Jake brought covid home from school with him a couple of weeks ago. It quickly infected me, then Jane, and to a milder extent, Jane’s mum and dad. We had a round of PCR tests, and they came back positive. Ten days of quarantine, or isolation, or whatever you want to call it. I was glad for the time off to be quite honest. While it was quite mild for the most part, I don’t think having to go to work would have helped my recovery. Usually I find that illness follows a linear path – starts bad and then gets better – but covid had peaks and troughs. The worst bit was at the start for sure. I was sleeping for ten hours and resting throughout the day; but after a day or two of that, things picked up. A sore throat developed here and there, headaches and random body aches came and went, but it was very manageable.
The worst thing for me was that I lost my sense of smell and taste for a couple of days. Everything tasted grey and slimy. It has started to come back a bit now, but I was really worried that it would take a long time for it to return. It brought me down, very quickly I must admit. It’s amazing how much joy something as simple as the taste of mustard, or sweetcorn, or even something as supposedly bland as chicken, can bring. It kinda reminded me how bland these past few years have been. Covid has sucked the joy out of me, and I’m not just talking about the past couple of weeks of being infected. These past two years, all the restrictions and lockdowns, they have really affected me more than I’d like to admit. They’ve curtailed my plans, limited my options, and made me feel like I’m in some kind of strange limbo. It doesn’t feel like a procrastination limbo, that’s an internal feeling akin to spinning my wheels – it’s an oppressive outside force that has me hemmed in. I’m sure I’ve developed some kind of agoraphobia. It’s hard to describe, exactly.
Still, the experience reminded me how important it is for me to crack on with my mission. And it feels like finally catching it and recovering from it is the perfect way to end the whole saga of lockdowns and restrictions. I’m glad I got it at a later juncture when it was milder, and I’m glad Jake did too. I know it seems like kids shrug the whole covid thing off and recover quite quickly, but with his asthma, he might have suffered a little more than most.
