Testing Positive

It’s a strange thing to avoid people, mask my face, and sanitize non-stop for months, only to sit here on my couch and be saddled with the one crazy ex boyfriend I was trying to hide from.

Me and covid side-by-side. My symptoms so far have been predictable, but also not. I had no symptoms when I was trying to get tested, but they were refusing to test me without symptoms, so I took my late Grandmother’s advice and “said what I needed to say” to get through the door, or to a testing station anyway. I told them I had an upset stomach, head pain, a sore throat, loss of smell. I started listing off every symptom I’d ever heard of for the virus. The woman on the other end of the phone sighed. She knew I had her number, the gig was up. Once finally swabbed, I breathed a sigh of relief. Now I could feel better once I heard the negative result.

Early Sunday morning, she called.

Positive. Positive. Positive.

I have rarely cried that long or that hard. I feel so much guilt on the daily about so many small things, that the weight of it truly crippled me. My kids, my students, my co-workers. My kids team. THE TEAMS. It was an awful, terrible sensation, I never wish on my worst enemy.

The photo above is one I snapped right after the results. This is my ugly cry look. I usually reserve it for special occasions. A positive result demanded it come out, in full effect.

A lot of people have been amazing. My co-workers, my girls, my family. My husband. He reminds me hourly that he is glad we got tested. That we got the information quickly, that we notified people as rapidly as we could, that it was possible others were walking around with symptoms already and school needed to pause before more people got sick. That he thinks it is powerful I put the emergency brake on the situation. But I feel it still. The guilt. The blame. It shouldn’t be there, but it is.

Last night, I lay in bed with terrible, horrible head pain. SO unrelenting, and powerful, that any tylenol I consumed felt like it just put a blanket on the pain, but held it in there firmly, positively firm. Besides head pain, I have felt some dizzy spells and what I can only describe as a heavy feeling on my chest. Not the tightness that comes with asthma, or the wheezing, but just a weighted down feeling. My husband coughs and sputters, but not in a scary way and my two kids move about the house fairly normally, while Joe and I sit slumped against the couch.

I don’t know how I”m going to remote teach in the morning and look at all those faces I let down and tell them this is the way we are going to learn for a little while, but I’m going to do it. If this experience has taught me nothing else, it has showed me that some people are truly uplifting and amazing and special. But also that people can be really sort of crappy and their agendas are heavier on their mind than the people who weave in and out of it. It has also showed me that any shame, guilt or blame I place on myself for contracting an invisible virus and letting the world know about it, was still totally worth it, if it saved a lot of people from getting sick.

The thing is, information is power, and once you have it, you have to give it away to the people who need it most and I did that. But the other part is, not everybody wants the information, especially if it doesn’t convenience them and especially at election time. I pray all my readers a smooth and speedy recovery if they are sitting with their crazy covid partner on the couch and that my other healthy readers keep their social circles small right now. If you feel like your kid has a busy schedule or that you aren’t sure if that runny nose is a cold or not. Just pause, wait, skip. You don’t have to do it all. To do everything. A small pause can save you from a longer one and a whole lotta grief. Stay healthy readers.