the one where I get covid

POP QUIZ!

What has two thumbs and COVID-19?

 

This guy!

A little bit of backstory. When we last met I was feeling horribly smug about how easy (sort of) I found the lumbar puncture procedure. 

Well. 

Obviously this led to a SIX DAY headache. 

Steve's top tip: drink as much water as possible. Yes, the nurses told me to do this. But how do you know when you've drunk enough water?

(Apart from noticing when your head stops pounding, anyway)

I eventually got it right when the Divine Mrs. D bought me a water bottle that has hour markings on it. It's surprisingly easy when there's a sort of game involved.

Anyway. 

All during this time it became obvious that COVID was burning through Little Ms. D's school. Before Christmas they were encouraging the wearing of masks, keeping year groups apart and staggering times of the start and end of the day. Obviously a pain for parents with more than one kid but at least it cut down on the crowds at the school gates. 

However in January, everything reverted back to how it was before, including no recommendation about mask wearing. We thought it was insanity and it appears we've been proven right. 

We've been getting loads of messages from the school of confirmed cases, across all the year groups. So it was clear that something wasn't going well.

And at the start of last week - just when I was dealing with my post-LP headache - we found out that one of Little Ms. D's best friends had a confirmed case. At the end of the week she was going for a sleepover at my folks' house so we thought we'd give her a quick lateral flow test, which came back positive, same as the PCR test she did the following day. 

Both me and Mrs. D did a Lateral Flow test that weekend - both negative - but when we did the PCR tests, although Mrs. D's was negative, mine was positive. 

It is, to put it mildly, a massive pain in the arse. I was getting ready to get my COVID booster jab and my flu vaccine, prior to changing my MS medication. Ever since this damn thing started, we've been so bloody careful. And I still got caught out. 

I don't want to come across like Donald Trump *shivers*, but I feel like I've got a bad cold. Having said that, the brain fog is strong, and the fatigue is - dare I say it? - relapse-like. But that ain't happening. 

Infuriatingly, people continue to swan around without wearing masks. And you can't even blame them, can you? Not when the UK government keeps telling people that it's all over. 

Plus it appears to be really going for that whole herd immunity thing, and is more concerned with the economy and getting back to a normal which didn't really serve the needs of the majority of people in the country.