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covid comes for me
Thursday, May 5 2022
I often move out to the couch in the teevee room at some point in the night, which is what I'd done at some point early this morning. As I lay there, I felt like something was wrong in my head in the space immediately above the bony roof of my mouth. I imagine the sinuses are up there, and it felt like some rodent had moved into them. It wasn't that I was in pain; it was just a mild discomfort of the sort I often have when coming down with a cold. In this case, though, it was more likely that I'd been infected with a strain of covid-19. I don't know how, though it's possible Powerful managed to infect me while I was down in the basement working on decommissioning the hot water heater the other day (he passed me in the hall at one point and shortly thereafter was incapacitated with a flulike illness).
Meanwhile, Gretchen thought maybe she too had symptoms, though in her case they were more easily dismissed as psychosomatic. She'd taken an at-home covid test in the wee hours of last night and it had come back negative, but those tests are notorious for missing early stages of covid. She suggested I take a test too, and initially I thought I should wait, thinking my condition to be too nascent to detect. But then I took the test any way and it came back positive. Covid had finally gotten me! In this case I'd probably been infected with the BA.2, or "stealth omicron" strain currently heating up the northeast. A little while after this result, Powerful finally managed to get his results from his test, and he too was positive. It seemed likely that Gretchen had already been infected, but on the chance she wasn't, I mostly isolated myself in the laboratory while Powerful did the same down in the basement. It was a beautiful spring day, and Gretchen was able to spend much of it outdoors.
Despite the feelings in my sinuses, I was otherwise healthy and could, for example, go for an electric-powered bike ride up the Farm Road and back. (I scared up a red-tailed hawk under the powerline while doing this, and when I went to look at where the hawk had been, I found a dead squirrel in the process of being disembowled.)
Later I went on a short walk down the Stick Trail with a camera and a battery-powered chainsaw, using the latter to clear some of the ice-storm-felled trees blocking the trail. I also made some repairs to the stone wall south of the Chamomile, which had experienced a couple minor collapses.
Gretchen made broccoli and a noodle bake for dinner, and we were able to watch Jeopardy! together while sitting far apart in the teevee room. We've been enjoying the winning streak of quirky Canadian Mattea Roach, who wins enough close games to make me think her streak won't continue. And yet it does.
As part of my self-quarantine, tonight I slept in the greenhouse.
How my positive covid result looked.
Tender new leaves of striped maple sapling
The stone wall in spring.
Click to enlarge.
Beautiful fiddleheads.
Click to enlarge.
Fiddleheads and flowers on the mountain goat path behind the woodshed.
Click to enlarge.
A species of small tender fern on the mountain goat path behind the woodshed.
Click to enlarge.
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