Things I Hate

[RandomHero]

Wait -- are you saying you hate this in the "things I hate thread"?

Probably his way of trying to mask how much he hates LA.

 

[Wor-Gar]

I think he was being nice...

...but maybe...

 

[Solidus]

I hate the LA fires and all of the destruction... I thought that was obvious from my comment

 

[jaztermareal]

I had it in 2005 and thought the same thing. It was really bad. Wait a minute ... that's when you did. Maybe it was a particularly nasty strain that year.

I recall in the late ish 2000's (2009 IIRC) as a young man I got flu while swine flu was circulating and in the news. It took me out a long time. I was SICK. For about a week I was bed ridden and not conscious for most of it (my GF described me as having gone into a coccoon and thought I was dead a couple times. She couldn't detect breathing etc and was panicking about what to do until I twitched).

I was still quite ill for a week or two after. Was the sickest I had ever been I think. Worst thing though was the stench it created. During my fevers the sweat soaked through the mattress and covers and it reeked of what me and the GF called "flu odour" (I still sometimes get it with flu but much weaker) but now as years have come to pass I have realised it smelled like wet dead animal / body decomp. We couldn't wash it out and ended up throwing away the bedding along with some of the soft goods around the flat that had absorbed the smell (it was everywhere and even months later areas smelled of it, even clothes in the wardrobe).



More recently at the early part of the Covid pandemic in 2020 before testing was available I did catch something coming back from Spain that had all the hallmarks of Covid including the more Covid specific symptoms but it wasn't all that bad really, basically as bad as seasonal flu.


Managed to avoid Covid after that for the most part by isolating until summer of 2023 when I had to travel to northern China with my wife and child (father in law was very ill with terminal cancer) only to catch Covid pretty much immediately when there. It hospitalised my child first and the hospital itself (not the first hospital we tried) was utter chaos, very sick children everywhere and people packed in the building like sardines. Had never seen anything like it before. The doctors refused to test for Covid and diagnosed my child with "bacterial infection" (as it turned out everyone was getting same diagnosis) and gave him what was supposedly antibiotics (all the patients were getting same drip) which did not resolve the fever etc. We took him home and managed to treat his fever etc with meds brought by the mrs cousin. We also confirmed it was Covid with multiple tests on him and the rest of us as we all got ill.

Normally my wife barely gets ill at all but she was bed ridden and among the many symptoms she had really messed up heavy period bleeding. Her step brother who was a young military man and vaxxed fully was hospitalised he was so sick, dude couldn't even sit up. My father in law came close to death too (and he was on chemo at the time so I was surprised he survived at all) while I was at about the 2nd sickest I have ever been and thought I was gonna snuff it. One of the many symptoms that made it so unpleasant was the constant strong burning under the breast bone and in the stomache. Took us about 1 week to get past the worst and reach a point we could get out of the beds and another 1-2 weeks of moderate to strong symptoms like very bad flu level. The symptoms varied from person to person as is the case with Covid but every test (which we had brought with us from UK just in case) was positive.


My wifes cousin personally knew several children who died during that wave (hers spent a month or so in hospital) and folk there were saying it was an increadibly strong variant, which was strange because the super mild Omicron variants were supposed to be what was going around and most people were vaxxed. Loads of people died but the gov wasn't reporting the deaths nor did international media even seem to mention it. We learned that the refusal to test for Covid was universal which means it was likely to hide the numbers and cause.

Coincidentally, meanwhile back in the UK, my sisters friend was hospitalised with Covid (nearly died) around the same time we were dealing with it in China. I can't recall if she said he had just come back from China or just come back from being in close contact with folk who had just come from China (I think it was the former not the latter) but in the hospital the test results said he had the original strain which was supposed to be extinct and not circulating mid 2023, which apparently confused the health workers and generated some conversation with his family. This might explain the exceptionally deadly wave of Covid in China as the virus should only mutate to be less deadly over time so being the original very deadly strain made sense and it would explain why Chinese hospitals were refusing to test for Covid and were not logging deaths. Probably a sample of original strain was leaked and started spreading through northern China at that time making us incredibly ill and causing my sisters friend to test positive for it.


Back in UK in 2024 we caught Covid again (whatever recent strain) and were barely even symptomatic, it was super freaking mild. Like a light cold.


More recently in late 2024 my wife was talking to a crematorium worker while waiting for her fathers ashes. The worker told her in a hush hush manner that in the first month after China lifted lockdowns that his crematorium alone (one of many in the city) had burned 8,000 bodies but the gov wasn't logging them. When I asked her if that was due to backlog from during lockdowns she explained that he said that it wasn't because of a backlog as during the lockdowns bodies were being collected from homes to be burnt, so that was all post lockdown deaths. He told her that they were burning bodies like crazy. Things got bad there and yet in the west we heard almost nothing about any of that and China's Covid death toll numbers were low.....




So yeah, long way of saying I hate Covid and Flu too.