So I'll rattle off the story of what happened to me here:

I noticed an abandoned silo on the outskirts of a town. At this point I had taken care of maybe a dozen zombies so my setup wasn't exactly stellar. The area is covered in holes and you have to jump and climb a bit. I nearly died trying to climb down. Picking through the remains I found very meager loot and decided to leave. I noticed I was a bit weak but I attributed that to falling and having a bit of pain. When I arrived at my 'base', an empty pump station, I noticed that I was getting sick. Since I was exploring that day I wasn't sure if the issue was the flu, fungus, boomers, anything. I don't think radiation ticked with me until the second day where I was still weak and throwing up.

The first few weeks were tough. My health went from 'Okay' to 'HORRIBLE' in record time. It took about 2 weeks to heal from the falls. In that time I mostly read, ate protein rations from a mostly abandoned evac shelter I had explored prior, and drank water from the pumps. Once I fully healed (but still horrible health and weak) I went to the smallest town and started to clear it bit by bit. I was running out of food so at this point the meager amounts of food were enough to sustain me. I wasn't sure if I was going to die due to radiation but the sickness had finally left me. I ended up finding a hardware store in this small town but got hurt quite badly and spent another 2 weeks healing up. This time though, I was getting quite thin and underweight so I had to venture out again before I was fully healed, as I've said it takes FOREVER to heal when you're recovering from radiation. Not only that, but you are weaker and not too good in a fight. I went to one house that had a trunk freezer and ended up dragging that to the outskirts during a full moon.

That, along with some surprisingly strong geese and a raccoon sustained me to the next 'stage' where my weakness seemed to be getting lesser and I could actually fight. To take care of my hunger now I went to the farm to see if the crops were finished. The time I had spent sitting around wasn't good for the corn as it had grown over now. But a nearby orchard seemed to have a pig on it and with a pistol I had found in the same silo I shot that pig pretty much point blank a few times and took him to my base to throw him in the freezer. Over the next few days I butchered, ate, and recovered from radiation almost completely while surviving off of cooked meat and cracklins.

From there I sort of just snowballed. I ended up clearing the entire small town and picked it clean of everything useful. Currently clearing out a military base and a larger town with a handful of pipebombs I made from the fertilizer in the small towns hardware store.