Covid Patients

The day after I got back from Green Bay was Wednesday. I was at work when my friend that I'd gone on the trip with sent me this text:

I couldn't believe it, but he was serious. He is a teacher, and had to take a Covid test before returning to work, and it came up positive. Maybe it was just in my head, but as soon as I read that text, I started to feel sick.

I'd just finished spending a weekend with the guy, sleeping in the same hotel room, driving in the same car, eating across from each other at the same table. If he had Covid, most likely I did as well.

That night, I found a 24-hour urgent care, and got a test of my own. It came up negative, however, so maybe it was all in my head, though it seemed to have gotten worse the whole day through. I had sinus pressure enough to feel like my head might burst, and my nose was getting pretty stuffy too.

My wife was taking no chances, however. She said that she just couldn't afford to get sick right now, so she insisted that I quarantine myself in my daughter's old room. She's gone off to college, so it was open. I stayed the night up there...and the rest of the week as well.

By the next morning, Thursday, I was most definitely sick. Now everything was wrong with me. I slept most of the morning through, hoping to be able to go to work when I felt better, but I didn't get better. I called my boss, and he told me to set up the work-from-home computer they'd given me months ago for just this eventuality.

It took a lot of effort to get through all of the proclivities of working from home, but eventually I was set up and ready to contribute to the editing of the afternoon news shows. I did my best to contribute, but I felt like absolute garbage the whole time. I was really sick, but they were counting on me to get the show on the air, so I struggled my way through the sniffling, sneezing, coughing, aching, stuffy head, and fever (especially fever) and got my job done.

On Friday, I called in sick. I needed to get some rest if I was going to get better. Covid-19 is supposed to be pretty intense. I've heard that this new omicron is less nasty than the previous variants, but I didn't want to mess around with it. I spent half of the day asleep, and was able to sleep again at my regular bedtime.

I had tested negative before, but my wife told me that the rapid tests aren't as reliable as the PCR tests. She said that I needed to test again to make sure that my results were correct.

The city had opened up a brand new drive-through mega testing center up the way at the community center, so on Saturday morning I went over to test again as soon as it opened. I should have gone a little earlier, because the line was pretty long by the time I got there.

It's hard to see, but that's a line of cars going all the way out of sight. They were pretty efficient, though. It didn't take all that long before I made it to the front of the line.

When I got under that tent roof in the picture, they shoved a cotton swab up my nose and collected a sample. They told me I would get my results in two to three days.

I went back home, and slept for the majority of the day again locked away in my daughter's room. Every now and then, someone would open the door and look in on me to see how I was doing, but they kept away from me for the most part.

There was a big storm coming through Houston on Saturday, however, and I woke up to my phone blaring a tornado warning for my little suburb at about 4:00 in the afternoon. My wife didn't want to let me out, but the second floor is the worst place to be if a tornado strikes, so she told me I'd better come out and come downstairs.

I spent a couple of hours in the living room waiting out the tornado warning and then went back up to my cell in the spare bedroom. Then at 1:00 in the morning, my phone blared out another tornado warning for our suburb, so I went back down and slept on the couch for a few hours before going back up again.

We didn't get hit by any tornadoes, but the whole town was not as lucky as our house was.

That's a house with a gigantic tree on top of it. The storms did that to one of my neighbors not far from our house. We'd lucked out again.

The next morning, Sunday, I was feeling a lot better. I still had some issues, but my body was definitely over the hump. I don't think I got hit with a fever again.

My wife, on the other hand, was coughing and hacking. It looked like my banishment to the spare bedroom was all for naught. She seemed likely to have Covid as well. Even my seventeen-year-old daughter was showing some symptoms. The nine-year-old, however, was not. He probably had it, but was handling it as easily as we've been told kids tend to handle it.

On Monday morning, my wife and daughter went to get tested at the same place I had gone to. We all stayed home from school or work, but my wife and I did our work from home. We waited for our results to come in, and when they finally did, my wife discovered that she had gotten sick as well.

She was positive. I was positive. Strangely, my daughter was not. She came up negative. Probably a false negative, but it didn't matter. She stayed home the whole week anyway, as did we all.

Luckily, none of us got all that sick. I probably had it the worst, and it was only about as bad as a tough flu would have been in ages past. So, we are all doing well, and are about to be able to get back to life again. It will be a pleasure to do so as well. You never appreciate your day to day life until it is taken away from you.