Maybe-COVID

It has been a strange week in the Jackson-Hollis household. Just about a week ago, Kelsey turned to me and said "I feel a bit strange". He was, in fact, swaying slightly. That evening, I made a bolognaise, and blamed the fact that the mince was out of the freezer for the fact that we both agreed the meal tasted like cardboard. The next morning, I woke up to a complete fog of fatigue, which reminded me of nothing so much as the first trimester of pregnancy. (And before you ask, please note we have spent the last however-many weeks of lockdown in the company of an energetic 11-month old who cackles maniacally if we so much as hug one another).

We shrugged at each other and agreed we'd better self-isolate. We live in a small village with a significant elderly population, many of whom we're very fond of - we didn't want to be unwittingly responsible for spreading 'The Plague', as Kelsey insists on calling it, around our beloved home. It was the day before our usual shopping day, but fortunately said small village is pretty well-equipped for self-isolating: all of the small, independent shops (greengrocer, butcher, and wholefood shop) do home deliveries. So we stocked up on fruit, veg, chopped tomatoes, and fancy icecream and hunkered down.

I have no idea whether it was COVID-19. Regardless, it was thoroughly strange. Kelsey had body aches, first all over and then condensing down into a drilling lower back pain. I mostly felt completely and utterly exhausted for no apparent reason, and very dizzy. Every now and then I would start coughing, continue doing so for half an hour or so, and then would just stop. The energetic 11-month old had a triple-nap day, months after dropping down to two naps. At no point did I feel like death warmed up, and I'd take the symptoms I did have over norovirus, normal flu, or hand foot and mouth disease (all of which I've had the pleasure of over the past year) any day. But it has been, and continues to be - still coughing, still knackered - one of the weirdest illnesses I've had.

I spent a lot of time during the past week of self-isolation feeling anxious about what people out there were thinking. The village grapevine has apparently been quite unaffected by social isolation, and we received anxious phonecalls, emails, and WhatsApp messages from various neighbours. I felt bizarrely guilty for causing so much worry. I felt conflicted about the fact that the headline going round was 'Dawn and Kelsey have coronavirus' when we didn't know for sure. What if we'd just had some other weird illness, and then caught the real thing in later weeks? Wouldn't people just think we were drama llamas, the couple who cried COVID-19? I spent a lot of time reading articles about the array of symptoms reported beyond the 'cough and fever' highlighted on government websites.
 
Ironically, it was only yesterday, a week after our bland bolognaise, that new advice was released to the effect that people should look out for loss of taste as an early symptom. It was also only yesterday that testing was opened up to the general public... with the caveat that you should get tested within no more than five days of first exhibiting symptoms. There are also no home tests available, and the nearest testing centre to us is an hour and a half round trip. On the one hand, getting tested could add to the sum of knowledge about coronavirus. On the other, travelling to get tested would probably see us doing more to spread our maybe-virus (getting petrol, potentially having to stop and get out if the wee one started crying, interacting with people at the testing centre) than anything else. So we'll probably never know for sure whether we had it.

Speaking of spreading, today saw us hit the magical 7-day moment when, according to UK government advice, we are safe to leave our home again. However, we've reluctantly decided to stay in for a further 7 days, since there seems to be research out there suggesting that you can be infectious for longer than that convenient week. Maybe we're no longer infectious, maybe we never had coronavirus, but maybe we did and maybe we still are. I'd much rather take the risk of being wrong and staying in self-isolation unecessarily than the alternative.

The cowpats of lockdown

As lockdown continues I've been struck by how much mine and my husband's emotional experience of lockdown seems to be travelling along the same timeline as that of other people. When I posted about lockdown lethargy, lots of friends said that yes, this was exactly what they were experiencing at that same moment. Meanwhile, almost everyone I spoke to at the end of last week agreed that the sixth week of lockdown was a real doozy.

In our household, last week saw every family member - including the ten-month old - regularly dissolving into bouts of distress. The ten-month old spent a lot of time asking to be put down and then face-planting the floor in despair at being put down. My husband hid in The Library (his home work-space) a lot, and I believe took to working on the spare bed in there, buried under duvets in a throwback to student days. I cried a lot and ate an entire packet of 'Squashies' in a single sitting. Us two adults found ourselves struggling with a sudden mutual dislike of on another's company, which was somewhat unfortunate given that we didn't exactly have anyone else to socialise with. Then, just as suddenly, the storm passed, and this week we've felt neither lethargic nor tearful, and returned to our habitual enjoyment of one another's companionship - though the baby is still clingy, and the duvet-nest has apparently become a preferred working space for my husband. 

Speaking of having a weight on my back...

For me, week six in lockdown made me think of Duke of Edinburgh expeditions (stay with me here!). On the two Gold expeditions, teams of students walk 50 miles or more over the course of 4 days (3 nights). The middle two days were, in my memory, the worst. The first day you are fresh, and excited, and striding up and down hills in the Lake District with a massive backpack feels like a novelty. The last day, you are sore, blistered, and aching, but you also know that you'll be hitting the finish line very soon, and can look forward to the imminent prospect of food not cooked on a camp stove, a shower, and putting the damned backpack down at last. In the middle days you have neither novelty nor the promise of sweet release to help perk you up. You are just trudging. Sometimes you can be perfectly content trudging - look at the landscape, breathe the air! - but sometimes one of your teammates misreads the map and you climb the wrong mountain and you say some rude words and storm off down the valley to get to the right mountain and skid on a cowpat and cry.
 
Right now we are in the middle days of lockdown, and last week was a wrong-mountain, slipping-up-on-a-cowpat sort of time. The frisson of novelty has worn off, and the question of when and how this will end (if end is really the right word) is still up in the air. The post-lockdown hugs, visits to friends and family, being able to have coffee in a coffee shop or lunch in a restaurant, are all too distant to lighten our steps towards them just yet.

This week, at least, I am trudging fairly happily. I'm tired of having the weight of lockdown on my back, as I'm sure many are, but me and my team-mates are getting on well again, and I've calmed down enough to stop and enjoy my surroundings. Until the next cowpat.