Uncertainty Rising

January 20, 2022

 

The woolly-apple brain syndrome is more manageable on this second day of antibiotics. The doc’s office phoned yesterday morning saying I had a urinary tract infection, and I needed to pick up antibiotics. 

 

I hesitated and said, I’m not sure I should. My husband tested positive for covid. 

 

No, no, don’t come. Come next week. No, you need to take them, Grab Express today.

 

As such, Health Risk Warning, Protocol 3 at MOH says close contacts of positive patients can test using the rapid antigen and if negative leave the house. But doctors don’t want you in their clinics, in case you manage to infect others there. Grab Express Instant brought the antibiotics to me in less than half an hour. Strong infection needing four doses a day for seven days. 

 

Yesterday afternoon, after two doses, I sat on the grey day bed in our living room feeling desolate and angry. A senseless, targetless anger. At tiny tiny corona virus? At the bacteria in my bladder? The spouse was isolating in my writing room. He was on a work call, and I was relieved that I didn’t hear much coughing. I was trying to work out the plot of a story, but it felt like a ghostly hand was slowly moving right and left through my brain, constantly agitating, and creating waves that never stilled. It was a bad day and by evening I paced back and forth in frustration (I got my steps at least), and later cried that I couldn’t, I just hadn’t, focused on anything all day. All attempts to document the emotional states I traversed had failed. I don’t know why I tried again today and tip-tapped-deleted repeatedly till I wrote this… drivel? 

 

My throat is sore as fire, and I have this terrifying headache, but I continue to test negative. 

 

The covid attack had come on suddenly for my spouse. Sunday morning, he tested negative and uploaded the test to his office, but by evening he was flushed, and the fever climbed all night, despite Panadol. He decided to work from home, the cough began Monday evening, and on Tuesday afternoon two red lines, one very thick, confirmed he was positive. 

 

Most things feel uncertain about my life, and the world in 2022, but I both never expected this, and at the same time knew that almost everyone would get covid at some point or the other. 

 

The corona virus is a trickster. A trickster is often described as a boundary crosser, something that ‘disrupts normal life and re-establishes it on a new basis.’ I don’t think that the corona virus can be described any better. My doughy covid and antibiotic mind doesn’t allow further introspection on covid as trickster archetype and why the world needs it, blah, blah, blah. I can only say it crosses every barrier set up to keep it out, it enters without visas or detection, multiplies, and has changed our world. I wish I could fast forward to a future year when I don’t repeat this ad nauseum.

 

We are lucky that covid struck our family in this wave when we can isolate at home, when they know so much more about it (though it often feels that we yet know nothing), when the number of days of quarantine — for the vaccinated — is fewer than it was in the first waves.

 

The immediate uncertainty has risen. What goes up must come down? 

Through everything in my life, one thing I used to be sure of was, that I would be climbing the stairs to the dojo on Saturday mornings around 8:30 am, but this week I cannot go. Every week on Tuesday and Thursday afternoons, I would most certainly would be found in the gym, but not this week. My chest aches with the uncertainty, the unpredictability, the not knowing of whether I will continue to stay negative.

 

To end this on a fun-er note… If I don’t catch covid despite sleeping on the same mattress as my spouse on the two days his fever was the highest, I will boast that it is because of karate training. My friend in NY says, don’t say that, intense exercise can reduce immunity — say instead that I scared it away with karate. That too works for me. I wish I could have scared away the bladder micros too.

Stay safe, and if you can don't let corona catch you.