After Paul and William tested positive for Covid last week, I told work I wouldn’t be in Thursday or Friday. I felt a little silly doing this, with no symptoms and after testing negative: I feel as if no one else is following any guidelines at all, not even testing or masking when they have symptoms; and also even though I am in my 50s and love my job and do it on purpose because I want to, I still always feel as if my bosses will think I am faking reasons not to come in. Over the weekend I texted with my supervisor, and we agreed that since Monday would mark five days of isolating/testing, then if I tested negative that morning, and didn’t have a fever or any new symptoms, and wore a mask, and stayed away from everyone else, I could come back to work.

By this morning (Monday), I’d taken a few more tests, all negative, and I didn’t have any new symptoms, so I hopped out of bed even before the alarm went off. I had that “Lots to do, places to be!” feeling. After showering/dressing (with an eye toward which shirt would have a good coordinating mask), I went downstairs and turned on some lights and opened the blinds and gave the cats fresh water and took a Covid test. While the test thought things over, I got some coffee and checked to see if some gifts I’d had my eyes on had gone down in price, and one of them had and I realized I didn’t want to wait any longer for the other one, so I placed an order.

I went back into the kitchen to give my not-hot-enough coffee a 30-second boost in the microwave, and I saw the test was positive. I was surprisingly surprised. I KNOW this is WHY we wait five days and test again. But I’d felt as if people would think I were BEING SILLY and SHIRKING WORK when I did so, and so I think part of me thought I WAS IN FACT just making a silly excuse not to have to work. When I WAS NOT!! And if I’d gone to work Thursday and Friday, my bosses and coworkers sure wouldn’t be glad about that NOW, when I’d have just found out that I exposed them all too!!

BECAUSE so many of my coworkers are not even testing when they’re sick, and several of them have been sick-and-at-work in the last week or two, my initial theory was that I’d been the original person who’d had Covid at our house, and that by the time Paul and William showed symptoms, I’d just stopped showing as positive on tests. But instead, it looks like Paul is once again the first patient—unless it was Henry. Henry has cat/environmental allergies and is always kind of snarfing and coughing, and he’s still in the school system and that’s an absolute cauldron of every virus, so it’s possible that HE had it first, then passed it on to us and was testing negative by the time Paul had a fever. Or maybe no, and he’ll test positive next. Well, who knows.

An upside is that this gets Covid out of the way before Christmas and my knee surgery: it would be way harder to have either of those disrupted. A downside is that I’ve already missed two days of work, I think I’m out all this week too if I remember right how this goes, and then there are some days we’re closed for Christmas and New Year’s, and then I have my knee surgery January 7th and am out for who knows how long. So I am missing a LOT of work. Partly I am feeling bad for my coworkers: if a checkout-desk person or manager is out, we all just cope with it and share the extra busyness, and the problem is resolved as soon as their shift is over and normal staff levels resume; but if I am out, things PILE UP HIGHER AND HIGHER and start to be real logistical problems for everyone. Partly I am feeling bad because of the imagined (or possibly not) feeling that managers always think their employees are looking for fake excuses to be out, and I don’t like to imagine my managers feeling that way about me, and maybe they don’t and I’m being ridiculous, but here we are, this is the temperament and brain I was assigned. Partly I am feeling bad because I really do like my job, and I feel restless and itchy when I can’t do it; and I get a fair amount of social/interactive replenishment from work, too. Partly I am feeling bad because of uncertainty: the twins have finals this week; how will we pick them up from school, will Paul be negative by then? Or maybe they gave this to us when they were home for Thanksgiving, and are now enjoying some short-term immunity. And will I continue to feel pretty much fine (very slight runny nose; occasional sneeze or cough; very slight Throat Feels Weird), or is this only the beginning and I will soon feel very much worse? Well, we shall see.

I am trying to continue to see this as Found Time: I was feeling stressed about having too much Christmassing to do and not enough time to do it, and now I have this bonus time to work with. I am also trying to see this as a happy little lesson for my workplace: my newish supervisor in particular seems to see the paging job as not a very big deal, and so he hadn’t been making any plans for the month or so I’ll be out after surgery; NOW he sure is making plans, as apparently when I was out for just two days last week, CHAOS DESCENDED. Distressing but gratifying.