The week of the virus

Last week started off with me reading a book called 'A planet of viruses' by Carl Zimmer. The version that I have was published in 2011, probably making it the first edition; I understand that there is now a third edition of the book. It's a good book in that it explains very well what a virus is and gives examples of several types of virus (because the book was published ten years ago, Coronavirus is mentioned briefly at the end in connection with SARS). But I found that it didn't go far enough in explaining things and found myself somewhat dissatisfied by the end. There also seems to be some confusion (maybe on my part) whether 'ten million viruses' means ten million separate virus entities (like ten million people) or ten million types of virus. There is a huge difference between the two. I imagine that the third edition is probably much better.

After completing that, I received a message from my DBA mentor, that he had been ill with Covid-19, "flat on his back for ten days" ... despite having been vaccinated twice.

As I noted in my previous blog entry, 'my body is like a barometer', I noticed that it was getting painful to swallow on Wednesday. By the evening, I was feeling much worse which is when I realised that I had been the recipient of a visit from my good friend the rhinovirus. I have just completed three days of feeling about 50% competent: either my throat aches or my nose drips (fortunately, not the two at the same time). I'm glad that this happened over the weekend as it didn't affect my professional life very much (I took Thursday off for personal reasons not connected with my health, but in retrospect, I'm pleased that I did). 

The worst part of this viral visit was at night: over the past few months I've been getting up about three or four times a night due to the diuretic effect of one of my medications, but the last few nights have seen me getting up six or seven times a night; this may be due to the increased amount of tea that I've been drinking, even though I try not to drink after about 6:30 pm. To add to my problems, last night I also had a mild nosebleed from my right nostril. This wouldn't be considered a problem, but having a nosebleed whilst wearing a CPAP mask is problematic. 

I've just looked at the CPAP data for the past few days (the last day with data is currently Friday); to my surprise, there were no apnea for the past three days, and the amount of deep sleep has been encouraging. The usage time is getting longer - Friday night had just over 10 hours - but as I always note, this isn't sleep time but rather the amount of time that the machine is working. On the other hand, my blood pressure has gone up.

Thursday morning was the date of my long awaited appointment with the new female sleep doctor. It turned out that the doctor was male, and that he is a 'lung doctor', not a sleep doctor. He was more interested in the pleural effusions that I had in late May/early June than anything to do with my sleep. Apart from a referral for a new chest x-ray that I was supposed to have done several months ago, and a partial referral to the sleep clinic in Hadassa hospital, the only thing that I learned from this appointment was not to place any value in the 'deep sleep' data provided by the CPAP machine. On the other hand, the apnea data is very good.

Following the doctor's observation about the deep sleep, I decided not to bother with headphones and binaural beats one evening. Funnily enough, after a few minutes of lying in bed, I began to feel 'lonely': I missed the noise! So I put the headphones back on and they do seem to help.