Day One – Faintly Positive

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 reading (Careering by Daisy Buchanan) and I even watched Suits for the first time since the initial lockdown of March 2020. What made it feel even more like lockdown was the increased number of video calls and messages between my boyfriend and I. We haven’t seen each other in weeks. We even postponed our second-anniversary celebrations due to exams, and now I have Covid. I feel frustrated, but I also have a nostalgia for the time in lockdown when video calls and lengthy messages were the building blocks of our now incredible relationship. Falling in love, miles apart, during a seemingly endless national lockdown is one of the scariest, confusing, and most rewarding emotional rollercoasters I have ever been on. That’s a faintly positive outlook, right?

Putting a screeching halt to the romance, I’m a mix of emotions at this point. There’s a sense of reminiscence for a weird time that was scary, but also felt so unfathomably ridiculous that it was almost laughable. Who knew that the Irish government would ever have us stay indoors and restrict our lives in such a significant way? It felt militant and wrong, but the fear they instilled in us made us do it anyway. Propagandistic? Maybe, maybe not. Nobody knew what to do at that point, so I blindly followed, like most people.

Now, I’m isolating because I’m actually sick, and I don’t want to give it to anybody else. The downtime is necessary for recovery too. This time, I don’t feel like I’m following a wagging finger. Buuuut, it all feels weird and somehow unfair to a point where I feel cranky and hard done by.

I realise this is a very petty and privileged outlook to have, but you can’t help how you feel at a given moment. I know things could be a million times worse. I’m just bummed, and it doesn’t even feel justified to be sitting on my ass, all alone, not at work, and putting my colleagues under pressure for a line I have to squint my eyes in the right light to make out. Tomorrow better be positive as hell or I’m throwing hands. At who, I’m not sure.