It's been four days since I posted anything but daily Twitter digests. As I'm sure you've gathered, I was not on vacation. As of today, I am in day four of covid isolation. This is really the first time I've even barely had energy to do any writing about it.
If not for finally catching covid—after more than two years, after increasingly holding out hope that somehow I could be a miracle example of someone who never got any form of it—I would actually be on day two of my Birth Week right now. I'd have gone across the waters of the Puget Sound to ride the mini train at Kitsap Sound Steamers with my cousin Jennifer and her kids, before staying the night at their house as usual. I would have hung out with Gabriel in one way or another last night, and I would have moved on tomorrow (with a ride from Jennifer, my bike in tow) to Olympia, then ridden with Dad to Wilipa Hills for the requisite Birth Week Bike Ride. And I even already had my one-way ticket purchased for what had then been Danielle's idea for Monday, where she would ride Amtrak down to Olympia and I would ride back to Seattle with her, and my bike, from there.
Obviously, none of that is happening. At least not yet. I had purchased a "nonrefundable" Amtrak ticket but Ivan noted that they are still refunding all tickets that need it due to covid. So, I actually did manage to cancel that ticket and get a refund on Wednesday. Danielle had almost purchased her tickets on Tuesday but when I texted her she said she had gotten distracted and not yet finished the purchase.
Quite unsurprisingly, I tested positive with my home test on Tuesday, after I finished my one full work day this week that I did from home, after getting all my stuff from the office late after work on Monday—masked, and when no one was there, on the day I was still testing negative—and bringing it all home. The emotions surrounding these positive test results are difficult to describe, after more than two years of shifting information, shifting risk assessments, different vaccine efficacies depending on what variant we were talking about. Seeing Shobhit's positive test result was the worst, because it was like,
fuuuuck. It almost felt like a form of shell shock, and we spent a good amount of time trying to figure out what it meant we needed to do with ourselves.
The photo at the top of this post is of my positive test result on Tuesday. You can see how faint my second line was—something every one of the many home tests I have taken now, have taken pains to say it doesn't matter how faint the line is: if there's a line, even barely visible, then you've got covid.
Shobhit's test had a second line so much more solid, and appearing so quickly it hardly necessitated the 15-minute timer, I find the difference fascinating, and wish there were some kind of data that accounts for the difference. Evidently though, there is no such data. The tests don't test how much viral load you have, only whether you have it at all.
There's a COVID Symptom Study app I've been using on my phone for nearly two years, where I open it daily, and report whether I feel normal or "not quite right." I also log my vaccines and what type and the date, plus all my tests and what type and the date. As of now, I have six lateral tests logged in there, five negative and one positive; five PCR tests logged, four negative and one positive; and three vaccinations logged, the two primary ones from March and April of 2021 and then the booster shot from October 2021, which I already knew waned in efficacy after several months, and here we are. six months later.
Shobhit and I both had virtual doctor appointments on Wednesday and he basically said to regard this infection as a second booster in terms of immunity after we recover, and that there won't be any need for another booster, if we even qualify for one, for at least another four months. Then again, that guy felt somewhat dubious as he also said I should expect to get infected with covid again eventually, no matter what I do. For all I know, he's right. Shobhit didn't like the guy because he spent so much time mentioning how vaccines are "politicized," likening him to a Trump supporter, which I thought was overreaching. That said, I did quite easily find that doctor's Facebook page, where I found he's a proud "left-leaning centrist" (a problematic position to take as far as I'm concerned; but, he's definitely not Trumpian) who at one point did indeed call for Dr. Anthony Fauci's resignation—a stance I find patently unfair. He also spends time asserting that vaccines are good things but clearly advocating that employers should have allowed unvaccinated people to stay employed rather than be subjected to ultimatums of either getting vaccinated or being let go, specifically if they had been infected already—because prior infection is, he says, as good or better than being vaccinated. Even I know, however, that that claim is disputed among epidemiologists. So, this was a different guy than the new doctor Shobhit and I just got at Virginia Mason because our last one got a new position, but the new guy was unavailable for immediate appointments, and to say I had mixed feelings about him would be putting it mildly.
Nothing about our living situation this week has been ideal, something that could have been far more simple otherwise complicated by the presence of our roommate, Ivan—who has, stunningly, not yet tested positive and, at this point, I'm not sure if he will. Still, he's a nurse at a rehabilitation facility, who is living with two covid-positive people, but because he told them he hadn't been less than 6 feet from either of us for 15 minutes in any 24-hour period, they had him still come in and work his overnight shifts. They just ask him to test before every shift, and go back to the N95 masks (which he says are very uncomfortable) they apparently stopped wearing all the time at some point. To Ivan's credit, I guess, he actually messaged me a screenshot of the text exchange between him and his boss, in which he noted he was vaccinated and boosted and has no symptoms, and according to them "infection control" guidelines say he can still work.
The thing is, though, all week, Ivan has been stunningly nonchalant about being near us. On Tuesday, after my first negative test and before my positive test, I had set up my work station on the dining table so that I could remain out in the living room while Shobhit stayed in bed in the bedroom. The naive hope at that point was that I would continue testing negative, and just stay out of the bedroom where Shobhit would remain. Still, were I Ivan, I would not have sat to eat my breakfast at the same table as me, one seat away, while I was working on Tuesday,
After I tested positive early Tuesday evening, I was much more diligent with putting on a mask when Ivan was around. Ivan is never out around us much, as he works nights so overnight he's not here, and then he sleeps through most of the day so in that case he's in his bedroom with the door closed. That said, Shobhit made a large batch of food in the kitchen on Wednesday, offered some to Ivan, and Ivan happily had two helpings of it. I know people whose heads would spin at the very idea, but then, we also know that infection really doesn't happen from surface touching, but rather breathing the same air.
And, as such, I tried to keep the windows open for the sake of circulation on Wednesday, just in an effort to make it a little safer for Ivan. See, on Tuesday and Wednesday nights, I slept on the hide-a-bed out in the living room, with Shobhit in the bedroom. The doctor we saw virtually on Wednesday told us there's not really any concern about us being in separate rooms if we are both infected, even though I found multiple sources online saying even in that case we should stay separated—but, once I got sicker, we swapped anyway, and Shobhit has slept in the living room every night since: Thursday night and last night.
Shobhit has been a huge source of stress for me at certain times this week, something I have told him multiple times only serves to weaken the immune system. He loves to suggest I do something as a home remedy for symptoms—breathe in the steam of boiling water, for example—and if it doesn't have the exact result he expects, he gets mad because he's convinced it means I wasn't doing it right. And I'm left to fantasize about shoving him off a fucking cliff. Not only that, but he's been entirely far too two-faced about a lot of this stuff, acting as though he's an authority on how to respond to our symptoms, yet completely ignoring long-established data regarding how much air circulation helps, and hardly ever putting a mask on when Ivan is around. Sometimes he puts his mask on as soon as Ivan comes out of his room, but what the fuck is the point if he's insisted on closing the windows and spent the last hour filling the entire fucking condo with his covid breath?
As I said, I am astonished Ivan seems still to be unaffected. Furthermore—and this is the worst part—Sherri reported on Facebook on Wednesday that she tested positive too. So far, she seems to be the only one we evidently passed covid to at her 70th birthday party. Wonderful. How terrible I feel about this should go without saying, but I am at least grateful that Dad and Sherri have been sensible from the start and are both vaccinated and boosted as well. if they were anti-vaxxers (thank god they are actually germaphobes so they get vaccines at any opportunity—except, evidently, for the second booster shot for which they now qualify), I would be truly terrified for her.
Anyway, I bring up Sherri here in light of Ivan not yet getting infected because, evidently, Dad has not tested positive either. I was exchanging texts with them on Thursday and asked if they were staying in separate rooms from each other and Dad said no! I can only assume this means they are still sleeping in the same bed every night, which is truly nuts to me. Dad followed up with, "I do not get sick very easily," and I wanted to bang my head against my desk. As of covid is like any other sickness! Well, if Dad never gets sick, to him it will just strengthen that belief, but I still regard it as severely misguided, not something you can ever bank on when it comes to covid.
It's true that, at this juncture, we're all lucky that we're getting it while vaccinated (it's all but a guarantee none of us will be hospitalized, a metric by which the vaccines remain wildly successful),
and that it's Omicron rather than Alpha or even Delta, and symptoms are likely far more mild than if any of us had caught it in 2020. None of this changes the fact that covid is still a different animal than any other common virus, like the flu or a cold. I mean, my own experience this week has been like having the flu for the first time in many years, the key difference for me being just how long it's lasting. My symptoms had their onset on Tuesday, and although how well I felt varied throughout each day, the average by the day was slightly worse each day until yesterday, and this morning was the first day I woke up feeling even slightly better than when I woke up yesterday morning.
Sherri texted me yesterday:
I got dressed today, cleaned the sheets and took a shower. I'm totally wiped out now. Maybe tomorrow will be better. Yesterday I felt so awful that it was indeed the first day I skipped a shower, and after showing again this morning, I really felt that same sentiment Sherri conveyed. Just brushing my teeth, showering and washing my hair took a lot out of me. I actually haven't bothered putting on makeup since Tuesday. That was one suggestion by Shobhit that I actually agreed with, as I'm not going anywhere and not even getting on work Zoom calls.
As for work, it's been a little bit of a shit show, this week being particularly bad timing for me to be out sick, with a ton of high-activity tasks against a deadline that necessitated the assistance of people who don't fully understand the tasks at hand. Eric in particular was a great help, but, even though I really should have just stayed off my work computer all day the past three days, I logged in several times each day, often to help answer questions about things that needed to be done. And now there's still like 300 items we have to re-batch next week for May promos that will cause a great deal of extra work for POS at stores, which I would have been able to prevent had I not been sick.
I don't want to get too deep into the idea of blaming myself for work issues because I got sick, though. That would be dumb. And I will say, any time doing any kind of work was clearly too much, I just got off the computer and lay back down. I've spent a lot of time in bed these last several days, which largely run together in a kind of blur at this point.
I will mention one thing about work that I found particularly vexing. In order to qualify for "quarantine pay," they won't accept a home test result. I had to get a PCR test done. Shobhit figured he might as well have one done too, so I made appointments for both of us Thursday morning to get tested at the UW testing center in the U District. For both Shobhit and me, this is literally the only thing we've left home for since Monday. I just found it uniquely irritating to have to break quarantine in order to prove that I'm legitimately in quarantine. I mean, I suppose it would be one thing if we lived in a house. But we had to move through our whole condo complex to get to the car. We never passed anyone either coming or going, at least.
We were out of milk and eggs by then, and Shobhit actually tried to convince me to let him stop at a store on our way home. This was one instance in which I successfully put my foot down. "Shobhit, we are not doing that!" I said. "You are covered in covid." (We got our official "detected" results later the same day.)
I have no idea when I'll leave again, actually. Current protocol—and a controversial one at that—is self-isolation for five days, day 1 being the first full day
after onset of symptoms. Afte that, we're allowed to go out, but only wearing masks around other people for the next five days. Sara in HR said I would need to do this if I came back to the office next week, which I could do as soon as Monday, but I'd have to wear a mask all day every day through Friday. I actually have a choice in this matter, so, no thanks! Just like I did when I worked from home through January to wait out the Omicron surge, I'll work from home through next week just so I don't have to wear a mask all day. If I have that as an option, I'll take it.
I even asked our neighbor, Alexia, for a favor yesterday which she was happy to do: I texted her to see if she'd pick up a few groceries for us at Trader Joe's and I would Venmo her back. She got us a gallon of whole milk, two red onions, a pack of flour tortillas, a dozen eggs, and half & half. I should have added a loaf of bread to the order but oh well. When Alexia left the bag at our door she threw in two amazing double chocolate cookies she brought back for us from a bakery in Portland. And, now we have milk with which to make chai, and Shobhit won't try to break quarantine to go to a store, until maybe tomorrow as then his five days are over. Also, several people at work offered to order groceries for us if needed, and Cathryn in particular is intend on buying us a dinner to be delivered to us by sometime next week, which makes Shobhit uncomfortable but I may take her up on it anyway.
I've pushed my Birth Week back one week now. So, this means I won't be back to the office until Monday, May 9. Well, possibly with the exception of Thursday the 5th, as I've been on a BIPOC "discussions" committee that planned a Merchandising team event that day, and as such I kind of feel like I should be at it. It depends on whether I can schedule all my
rescheduled Birth Week activities around it, and right now at least, it looks like I can.
Anyway. Remember when I mentioned that had I not been sick, I'd have met with Jennifer and her kids for Kitsap Live Steamers today? Well, not so fast: Jennifer informed me this morning that Hope—her 19-year-old daughter who has refused to get vaccinated from the start—has also tested positive. Literally, as of this morning. Getting that news, I probably would not have gone forward with the plan regardless. Jennifer and Matthew had been staying overnight at Deception Pass and apparently Hope had texted her she wasn't feeling well, while they were on their way back. She even tested twice. (Side note: when Sherri tested on Wednesday, she wrote in a comment on Facebook that she hoped it was wrong and that she was going to test again ... I was like, if it's positive, it's reliable: you have it.) Jennifer messaged me,
Right now I’m really grateful she spends most of her time in her room. For now anyway, the rest of them are testing negative, and Hope is isolating in her room. I worry the most about her though, being unvaccinated, and hope she doesn't get super sick. I mean, Tracy from work got it in February and she was vaccinated but not boosted, and she was laid out for a week.
I guess you could say that I've been too, depending on your parameters. Much of today I am coughing a little still but not as much as before; I have a runny nose but not as bad as before; but, for most of the morning I just felt physically exhausted. Shobhit and I binged through the second half (four episodes) of
Bridgerton season 2 on Netflix in the late morning and early afternoon, and when that was done, I came back to the bedroom yet again to lie on the bed. I slept for a bit, but woke up with a new discomfort: a kind of acute aches in certain spots of my abdomen. They seem to have subsided, and I've actually been feeling notably better as I've written through this lengthy update on my Week with Covid.
It's odd, how much fear we all had about getting it two years ago, even one year ago. Then the relief after vaccinations, only for that to be tempered due to the staggering number of people refusing to get vaccinated. I remain proud of my region's exceptionally high vaccination rate: < href="https://kingcounty.gov/depts/health/covid-19/data/vaccination.aspx">93.2% with at least one shot. Of course, at this point it's only truly useful to have both completed the primary series and had the booster, which only just over half the population have done. "Vaccine fatigue" is such a ridiculous notion if you consider the kind of fatigue you get if you get really sick or, god forbid, wind up in the hospital.
Anyway here's an unusually butch picture of me. I didn't even shave yesterday. But I did today! And now I'm tired.
[posted 7:05 pm]
