Nicole Kirwan

Wednesday 06 April 2022 Day Six – That Tastes Funny… “I’m not feeling as mega shite haha but still crap” is how I described my form for Day Six. I tested again, and still blatantly positive. I believe that waves began to lap upon crap and mega shite, and everything in between, all day after this. I sat waiting on the doctor’s appointment I made the night before. Frantically logging into the app, checking my permissions and push notification settings so as I don’t miss my appointment (I have notifications off for pretty much everything). I can’t even enter the digital waiting room that I have a direct link to on the confirmation email. What am I doing wrong?! I soon realized I made the appointment for Friday. Covid Brain strikes again. It doesn’t stop there. I tried to even out the rest of my morning with breakfast, coffee, vitamins, etc. Brushed my teeth, put my toothbrush back into the holder…put my toothbr- oh fuck sake. Not my toothbrush. I had been deliberately keeping my too...

Tuesday 05 April 2022 Day Five – A Whole New Beast Don’t take a cough bottle on an empty stomach. Just don’t. Don’t be like me. There I was, after cooking up a nice breakfast, taking all my medications and supplements, and doing my best to fuel myself well for recovery, I become more thankful for the dioralyte than I realised I would be. Suddenly everything I had taken that morning had all been but flushed away. I will admit, although I knew my IBS was likely to be triggered when fighting off a virus, I did begin to worry that this could be a symptom to take much more seriously. Gastrointestinal symptoms of Covid can be found in patients who end up in hospital. Dehydration can leave the person susceptible to pneumonia. Was I about to be that person? The triumphant wave of my positive antigen test in an attempt to lighten my mood on Thursday felt like a steady smack of reality as I weighed out my options. Was I experiencing a bad Covid symptom? Or, did I eat something bad? That’...

Monday 04 April 2022 Day Four – One Big Fog After a night of nausea, I awoke to the realisation that I couldn’t fend this off with a couple of Panadol and a few series on Netflix. It was time to graciously request a friend’s help. I compiled a list of things I thought might help: sinus rinse, the biggest box of the strongest lemsip they have, a cough bottle, motillium and dioralyte. Oh, the glamour. She came through, and then some, with a vegan bueno. Sweet angel. Covid brain is very real. It has been so hard to focus on any one task. Before, as I mentioned, I could do one or maybe one and a half tasks/activities with my day and I would be wiped out tired. Now, I’m too tired to even attempt anything, and my brain will not focus on any one thing anyway. These entries have been really hard to keep up with on the daily, but I’m trialing it as a writing exercise whilst I’m not being too precious about what I post. My day consisted mostly of small plates of food and bed rest with my...

Sunday 03 April 2022 Day Three – I’m Losing Track I started writing this (on April 5 th because I’ve been too wiped) and was writing about the completely wrong day. Since I’ve been struggling to keep this up daily, I decided that my research lies within my Whatsapp messages. This way I can see what I was complaining about on what day. Let’s *vinyl scratch* back to Sunday. It’s Sunday morning, and I’m feeling relatively energised considering I woke up before 5am and couldn’t get back to sleep, only to sleep far too late into the morning. 10:30 probably isn’t a big deal when you’re sick, but I’ve been rising at 7:30/8:30 most mornings. A lie in from my usual 6AM. I’m sure my sleep schedule will be out of whack in no time. I make my usual peanut butter and banana on toast with a mix of seeds and some maple syrup. My isolation morning challenge is stepping up my latte art skills on my home espresso machine on my extremely mediocre flat whites. It’s improving. I feel sick, but noth...

Saturday 02 April 2022 Day Two – Positive as Hell I’ve tried to keep up with writing these on the day so that I’m as up-to-date as possible. I’m actually writing this on Day Four because the brain fog and fatigue have stopped me from doing much else other than just about feeding myself and doing around one, to one and a half activities a day. Yesterday’s activity was ironing, and I took to bed shortly after, but we’ll get to that. Day Two. I woke up, as I have been each morning, mildly optimistic despite the raging gut feeling that I’m in for it. In for long one, a rough one, teetering, ricketing up the mast of the rollercoaster, only to feel the steep downfall and look up again to see another mast, higher than the last. It’s not that bad. I’m young and healthy. This will be fine. Majorly inconvenient and a big fat bummer, but absolutely, certifiably fine. I’m just being dramatic. My cough is breaking, phlegm has entered the chat. The “positive” line is aggressively present and m...

Friday 01 April 2022 Day One – Faintly Positive The coughing became more frequent, but my spirits stayed relatively high. Panadol kept my headache at bay, and I woke at 7:30 to laze about before doing a whole load of chores for the morning. I felt like a cheat. How could I be off work with such mild symptoms and a barely-there positive on my antigen test? I took another nasal swab test. Faintly positive. Fainter than you could ever imagine. In fact, I thought I  was  imagining it. Still, that’s a progression from yesterday, considering my nasal swabs were coming back negative but my spit said otherwise . I know people who have had faint antigen test results one day and clear-as-day positives the next. No spit involved. So maybe I was just one step ahead and detecting it early. Or, I was at the tail-end of an infection. If so, why the symptoms now? As expected, my isolation was reminiscent of the early Covid days of “flattening the curve” for a couple of weeks. I did some readi...

Thursday 31 March 2022 Day Zero – I Think… They call it Day Zero. My Day Zero may have started the night before when I began to cough. Morning Zero started at work when I found out I was a close contact, again. Not just a close contact, but a close contact of three people who I had spent a significant amount of time with over the last number of days. This meant that I was surrounded by Covid in a way I had not previously been. She was gunning for me now. Mid-morning on Thursday I was clearing my throat of a tickle and fending off a popping sensation in my ears. It wasn’t going away so I notified my manager of how I was feeling. Wide-eyed, peering over her coffee cup, her eyebrows showed her concern: “really!?”. “Really”, I replied. “If you feel you need to do a test, just go and do it. Better off knowing”. Off I went on what I didn’t realise would be a wild goose chase for an antigen test. Naas was a Covid hotspot, well, the hottest spot in the country the previous week, so nowhere...

Somehow, the chick-flicky, turn-your-brain-off, time-wasting, relaxing TV show I love to binge, Sex and the City , has become one of my greater inspirations or motivators to do what I love: write. Perhaps not quite in the way that you might imagine but seeing SJP/Carrie Bradshaw tap-tapping away on her brick of a laptop makes me want to tap away at my keyboard; cross-legged on a couch, the floor, at my bedroom window, or even my desk – purposefully placed for such activity. I’m not big on on-screen entertainment. I don’t like TV, I’m not very into movies, and I try to keep my Netflix time to a minimum. I’m a sucker for YouTube all the same. The thing is, I don’t like the time-wasting of flicking through TV, ending up watching something shite cuz there’s nothing else, and sitting through the same ads every 15 minutes. It makes my skin crawl and I wish I was doing something else, always. That being said, I have somehow fallen in love with a couple of shows: Sex and the City, Friends,...