Not COVID

Today I woke up, again, feeling like garbage. I had convinced myself that I probably did have COVID, but that I wasn’t in any danger. I mainly wanted results so I could be sure. My appointment wasn’t till after noon, so my intent was to take a sick day and rest as much as possible, letting Missus take over the business of dealing with the children for the day. I was the first person up, besides the cats who were doing their best to let me know that they were out of food. I made it downstairs and plopped my butt on the couch, and fell back asleep until Younger came thumping downstairs.

She wanted food, but I just wanted to crawl back upstairs to bed. Missus wasn’t rousing, so it fell to me. There was evidence of a party, mainly dishes and cups, strewn about the living room, as well as trash from my dinner pizza that I hadn’t put away. I think I slept at some point, but wound up getting back up and cleaned up, brewed a pot of coffee, and plopped my butt upstairs in front of my computer to check my Perpetuals and Twitter.

I wound up playing video games for most of the morning, with breaks to read a couple hundred pages of REAMDE. Around noon I killed a couple of baloney sandwiches and drove off to get my test. The pharmacy was well across town. The one nearest to me wanted five to seven days to return a result, and I knew that such a wait would be unbearable and too long for me to try and isolate the kids. I actually got there about twenty minutes early, which was good, as there were about five cars in front of me. I finally pulled my car up to the window two minutes before my scheduled time.

The woman at the window took my information, gave me the test materials and asked me if I’d done it before. I said no, and she told me to take out the swab so that she could walk me through it. It was a bit worse than I expected, and caused all sorts of adverse bodily reactions. My eyes started tearing up, my nose felt like it was going to start running. I asked how long for my results, and was told one to three hours.

I got home, told the girls I was sequestering myself in my bedroom and read. I managed to wait almost a full hour before I started checking my email, waiting for results. When they finally came through I was relieved and went down to tell the girls.

I spent the rest of the day the way I had started it, lounging in front of the computer, or laying in bed. I’m hoping tomorrow will finally the the day that I wake up and can get back to my regular schedule. This cold or whatever it is had outstayed its welcome. For real.