I am under-protected
J, my wife, has the Covid. It is the second time she has had it, and it's giving her a nasty old time. The household stockpile of paracetamol and ibuprofen tablets has been much depleted as she seeks some relief from the headache, nausea, and general body-ache, and I am on duty for the 'Turn the heating on, turn the heating off' commands as her temperature management systems are evidently borked at present as well.
I am steeling myself for a bout of it myself but, after her suffering for three days now, it hasn't come for me so far. I suppose theoretically my protection from the vaccine is at its lowest right now as well, because I am due for my annual booster shot in two weeks. This does not fill me with confidence that I will get away with it, especially as, except when she's off at work, we are generally in the same vicinity.
I am classed as vulnerable because MS is already messing with my immune system. The sort of 'vulnerable' that was prioritised for grocery deliveries at the start of the pandemic, when everyone was locked down and only allowed outside once a day for exercise - masked of course - but is now 'Well, we've got injections now, so that'll do'.
Oh, and masks? Naah, nobody needs those any more, they only make other people scared there's something scary to be scared of, everything is fine, no need for those, honest.
It helps massively that we live so rurally. It was actually very easy - and very pleasant in the extra quiet of lockdown - to not see another human being for months. I could drive off to my hidden dog walking places twice a day and come home again without seeing a soul. It was only TV and internet that revealed that the rest of the country's population was still there, albeit seemingly in quickly reducing numbers.
Do you remember all those 'Nature is healing' memes? How quickly they got us all 'back to normal' after that, eh?
But Mrs B works in a local farm shop, surrounded by the public at close quarters for eight hours at a time, whereas I am still hiding out at the brumph country estate,1 still as vulnerable as I was at the beginning. Out of the two of us, she is the one that is most likely to pick an infection up again. In previous year's we have been able to get her a vaccine shot as being the carer for a vulnerable person, but the policy has changed, so she won't be getting one this time. It's too late now anyway.
So I am sat here this morning, monitoring my own systems as Mrs B sleeps in (I welcome the fact she can sleep through a lot of it). I didn't get it myself after the first time she did, so I allow myself the thought that I might be asymptomatic, which would be the luckiest protection that I could wish for in a society that has apparently moved on to their protection from Covid being based on luck.
There's still a worry about any unseen damage being done by the virus on the quiet though.
Is that the start of a headache, or do I need to drink some water to hydrate a bit more? Am I getting hot, or is that just the sun poking out from the clouds and shining into my office now? Is that tingle the start of a sore throat?
We wait.
If you liked the post, click the toast! (I guess just close it and quietly slink away if you didn't)
this is a joke. We are not landed gentry and the estate is a figment of my imagination. It's more 'a state', although it is in the countryside.↩