Things are Not Ideal

I had been looking forward to Saturday night because M was coming home from college — yay! But then on Saturday morning, Cute W tested positive for Covid. He’d been exposed through work — all of our household near misses have been because of his work — and had tested negative enough times that we thought maybe we’d managed to evade the virus again (until Saturday, the only one in our family of four who’s gotten it was M, during her gap year in Colorado). After oh-so-cautiously quarantining himself for a while, Cute W had moved back into our bedroom on Friday night.

So now we had one Covid positive family member, one negative person (me) who’d been double vaxed but also spent all night breathing Covid air in a room with the windows open, one negative person who may have been exposed, but not too much (J), and one negative person moving back into the house. And that’s how it’s been, at least as of Monday night.

Cute W feels bad but not entirely horrible, and he keeps doing things like saying that he’s going to take a nap but then actually pressure washing the house instead. He is masked up except when he is in our bedroom, which is most of the time that he’s inside. Meanwhile I have moved into the basement playroom for sleeping and eating, then I’m masked when I’m on the main two floors of the house, partly to avoid Cute W’s cooties and partly in case I end up testing positive the next time I test. J figures that if she hasn’t already caught it from us, it’s not going to happen while we’re masked, but she’s masking up around M in case she’s got her own virus brewing. But M, who has already toughed through her first bout of Covid and since sailed through a few near misses unscathed, is just living dangerously and mask-free.

It is a bummer. Cute W is not very good at resting quietly, but he also doesn’t feel great and the rest of us don’t particularly want him wandering the house, so that limits his options. I had already been waking up with a headache each morning from allergies, and now I am definitely tired and feeling bad, but on my last test (last night), I was still showing up as negative. So I don’t know if the virus is here and still under control with my antibodies, or if I my next test will be positive (each negative test feels like I should’ve waited a bit longer), or if it’s entirely psychosomatic paranoia. J luckily feels completely fine, and we are crossing our fingers that she’ll stay that way, with a big track meet on Wednesday and a ton of important activities next week.

All in all, we’re doing pretty well, considering, but we are all just a little bummed. We were looking forward to things like sitting around the dinner table and chatting. That is one of our favorite things to do, actually. But it’s either felt too hot or too cold to do this outside, plus no one’s feeling that great, so we are serving ourselves dinner and carrying our plates off to our designated zones in our house. To add to my personal crankiness, I am skipping workouts because of the morning headaches and to let my body’s energy go to immunity battles; I am working in low-maintenance grooming mode since my bathroom is out of my quarantine zone; and something has shifted in the fit of my glasses so that they are basically sliding off my face any time I tip my head. So I am wandering around my house in grubby yoga pants not feeling great and wearing a sweaty mask and dropping my glasses, say, into the dishwasher where they land on some dirty dishes and then I end up washing my glasses and muttering curses to myself. Like I said: not ideal.

Send healing vibes, y’all!