So on Friday my daughter started complaining of a sore throat, stuffy nose, headache. I had all the same symptoms, too. In a normal year, we would have just shrugged it off as a back-to-school cold making the rounds.
But this is not a normal year.
For all that many activities have begun in a more-or-less normal fashion, this year is still not normal. It is normal-ish. In many ways, having an “almost normal” year is more disconcerting and disorienting than having a wildly divergent year, like last year was.
When things are nearly normal, there is a tension you never escape. You cannot relax fully, as you could if things are truly normal, yet you feel like you should be more relaxed than you are. But this normal-ish environment keeps throwing small bumps and curves in your path and there are still challenges to be met and managed. It is almost more exhausting living in this so-near-and-yet-so-far zone than when everything was upside down. Or maybe it’s just differently exhausting.
So we both had colds—but all these symptoms are also Delta COVID symptoms. We took an over the counter at home test, which are not terribly accurate for non-symptomatic cases but should register something if you are actively symptomatic, as we were. Completely negative. A relief.
For school, though, if you have COVID-like symptoms, you need to get a negative PCR test (the really accurate DNA-based type you have to send into a lab). It was impossible to get one over the weekend, so I got one on Monday. Then we had to wait to see how long the results would take to come in. Even in a normal year, I would not have sent her to school on that Monday, because she was not feeling great, and on Tuesday I probably would have kept her home, too, just to let her recuperate. But I was worried that she may end up having to stay home feeling fine while waiting for the test results.
Luck was with us, and we got the results on Tuesday. Negative, so back to school on Wednesday!
This is illness in the time of COVID, especially when you have an unvaccinated person involved. Schools have to be extremely careful to avoid an outbreak, since most of their population is still vulnerable. In five weeks of school, we have had 3 (unrelated) cases. I am thankful for the precautions our school is taking, and also thankful we live where testing is easy to get and free of charge.
Here’s hoping we don’t need to do this again anytime soon!
The Hectic Time of Year—CoronaLife Day 579
For a lot of people, the Christmas/New Year’s season is their crazy season. While that has its own stresses, I find this time of year, from mid-October to usually sometime in November more stressful.
Halloween, in turn, involves many tangential activities. Pumpkin-picking, corn mazes, costume parties, trunk or treats, hayrides, and the local bonfire, not to mention trick or treating on Halloween itself. The costume must be bought or made, probably starting no later than the beginning of October, if there is anything you need shipped.
I mentioned her birthday is close to Halloween. Well, you can forget having a birthday party anywhere near her actual birth date—there are too many other things going on (see above). So we usually have it in November. One year, it was the first weekend in December!
Just preparing for and doing all these things is hectic enough, but for those of us who are not naturally social beings, it can be a lot of people-time, too. In this Covid era, it comes with new stressors as well, especially after a year of limited social activity. My daughter greatly missed all these things last year, and is ecstatic they are back this year.
Which brings me to why I am always super-stressed at this time of year. Because it is also cold and flu (and now Covid) season and these things fly around school like crazy. I always hold my breath from now until whenever all these activities are over, praying that she stays healthy. I don’t want her to miss anything she loves, especially not this year.
I know it is a bit silly to worry over something I cannot control, but that is life with anxiety disorder. And so I will spend the next 5 weeks crossing my fingers and counting down the days.
Then I will take a few deep breaths and start my Christmas shopping.