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.

It is fair to say I am a little emotionally fragile right now. I am returning to some of the basics I remember relying on in the early days of the pandemic: eat! exercise! take vitamins! do something social—and that includes a quick text or email! clean something—and that includes doing something small that takes one minute, or throwing away one expired bottle/jar/can of something! notice when I’m scrolling/refreshing beyond the point of usefulness and do something else instead! Other soothing little thoughts: Go Easy. Give It Time.

I am despairing about Elizabeth missing her first few days of her very first year of college, and I am attempting (1) to put that into perspective (no need for me to list for you all the ways in which things could be worse, I feel we all have over-ready access to those thoughts) and (2) to remember how I have felt similar despair over other things that have Gone Wrong, and then gradually with time have felt less and less despair, until sometimes later I say “What? Oh yeah! I vaguely remember being upset about that!” It is likely that before too long I will feel less despair about this situation, too. I will wait for that.

I am trying not to despair over the certainty that soon Edward will have Covid: the goal all along was to push that inevitable event DOWN THE ROAD, which we have done; we have already succeeded in that goal. If and when it happens, everything/everywhere is set up to be More Ready to deal with it—and Edward has been given extra vaccinations because of being immunocompromised, and those vaccinations have been shown to lessen the severity of the illness. I will not think of all the various ways in which Covid could make the first semester of college difficult; I will not catastrophize and say “Well, ‘More Ready’ except if we are just plunging RIGHT BACK into overwhelmed hospitals and unfamiliar variants!!” And I will not rant about how we as a society decided we were Done dealing with Covid, and so now we get to keep dealing with Covid. Instead I will say again that the goal was to push Edward’s inevitable infection down the road, and we are down the road.

I am going to England. I am going in a week, with a large extended-family group. I haven’t known how to bring it up.

I have never traveled out of my country. I have barely traveled within my own country. I am not really a traveler. I have a dear friend who has just returned from a trip to England and is familiar with how my brain works, and she advises mentally preparing ahead of time to go with the flow. I will be so breezy! Lost luggage? An excuse to buy clothes in England! Like the time Carsick Toddler Elizabeth barfed just as we arrived at the mall, and instead of despairing and turning the car around and driving the 40 minutes back home, I went into Target and bought her the cute pink four-piece mix-and-match Carter’s elephant pajamas set I’d wished for an excuse to buy, and then took her into the bathroom and changed her, and put her barfy clothes neatly into the plastic Target bag the clerk had just used for the new pink elephant pajamas! Day saved! I still rejoice in that triumph, and I do not miss the $14.99!

We have acquired some English/British pounds. We have been told that tipping is not a thing in England, but my feeling is that hotel-room cleaners are underpaid the world over, and would not say no to some cash. I was a little worried that it would be considered insulting, but then I thought, what if I were a hotel maid in a touristy area anywhere in the world: wouldn’t I be aware that tipping customs varied widely? I feel as if I would be aware of that. I feel like AT WORST I would think “Those silly Americans, ignorant of our local customs!”/”Yay extra money to buy groceries/electricity!”

We have arranged a cat-sitter, the dear daughter of a dear friend. I have been very skittish about people in our house ever since The Housecleaner Situation, which let’s say no more about, and this was one of my most stressful arrangements to consider. I thought about each possible candidate, and considered how safe and comfortable I would feel having them in my house, and the one at the very top of my list was available and willing, so I am feeling very lucky. And her mother is one of the most competent and capable people I know, and exactly who you’d want on hand in an emergency, so that’s a nice feeling for if anything DOES go wrong. (She was the emergency contact on my passport form, too: she would have my corpse shipped home like billy-o!)

I am trying not to overdo the packing, but I am a not a pack-light person. I keep reassuring myself that as long as we have our passports and credit cards, we can figure everything else out. People LIVE in England, and THEY manage to find conditioner and acetaminophen and hair elastics and lip balm! They might CALL them something else, but they HAVE them!

I don’t have a concept of what clothes to pack for early July in England. Shorts and t-shirts and sunhats? Sweaters and raincoats? I will just bring it all. I am bringing a baggie of laundry detergent so I can wash things in the sink. Or, are there washing machines in/near English hotels? I guess I’ll soon know!

Paul is in charge of Electrical/Computer/Phone. He has purchased various adapters, and arranged various phone plans. We had a slightly baffling conversation about nightlights: he was assuming I would want them in England, and had been doing research. I do not want at all want nightlights in England. AT HOME we have these fabulous nightlights that come on automatically if there’s a power failure and can instead be used as flashlights if needed (that’s the Target link; here’s the Amazon link if preferred) (honestly if your power EVER goes out where you live, GET THEM, you will BLESS YOUR OWN NAME when the power goes out—and in the meantime they make fabulous nightlights), and it’s true I have them sort of “all over the house” (top of the stairs, bottom of the stairs, all the bathrooms, kitchen, laundry room, hallway), but that does not mean I need them IN ENGLAND.

Two of my big frets are Elizabeth’s tree nut allergy (we will have benadryl and Epi-pens in several backpacks) and her vegetarianism. Her vegetarianism wouldn’t be a big deal if she weren’t also a picky eater. I am literally bringing a loaf of bread and a jar of peanut butter and a few plastic disposable knives, based on two previous trips where I fervently wished I had done so.

My biggest fret of all is probably Edward, because Edward is immunocompromised and we will be traveling, and the pandemic doesn’t mind one little bit that we said it was over, it’s still going right ahead and damaging/killing people! I found out only two days ago that a month ago the CDC approved a second bivalent Covid-19 booster for immunocompromised people, so we went today to get that done. I was worried the pharmacist would want me to prove Edward’s immunocompromised status (an earlier pharmacist wanted that), but she did not; she just gave the booster. Probably she could see that the earlier shots on the Covid-19 card were clearly on an immunocompromised schedule, or maybe it’s just that now there’s no competition for vaccines so no one thinks we’re trying to get away with something. I am remembering that it takes a couple of weeks for the booster to kick in, but maybe that’s wrong, and anyway at least there’s one week to get it on board, and that’s better than not.

And I am a little fretful about my knees. I have purchased two knee braces to try. I have trekking poles. I have sneakers, though they’re a little worn and I wish they were newer/springier—but at least they’re broken-in and familiar.

Sometime this week I am going to go to a used book store and buy a stack of used books. I like to have inexpensive used copies so I can leave them behind as I finish them, which gives me more room in my luggage for souvenirs.

Souvenirs! What souvenirs should I buy in England? What are some things they have in England that we don’t have in the United States, and which can fit in a suitcase?

I had decided I wanted to get the Moderna version of the new Covid booster, for the same reasons various like-minded commenters mentioned: I’ve heard it’s best to mix, and I like balance; so if I have two Pfizer and one Moderna it would be nice to get another Moderna; and apparently the Moderna is a slightly larger dose, which, who knows if that matters, but more seems better. But I kept checking and the Moderna kept not being available anywhere near me, so finally I seized my moment: I was available Tuesday afternoon; the nearby pharmacy had a walk-in day for the new Pfizer booster; and I had Wednesday off from work so I could recover if necessary.

Tuesday I felt fine! No issues. In the middle of the night I rolled over and noticed my booster arm was sore. In the morning when I woke up, it was still sore, but I had no other symptoms. I went for a walk, and when I came home I was doing some stretches for my knees, and I thought “Whoa, my legs and knees are weirdly sore; some of these stretches don’t feel good. Did I overdo the stretches yesterday or something?” Then I was sitting at my computer and I thought “What did I do to my poor neck and shoulders, they’re so sore!” And then I started feeling chillier and chillier, and my whole body hurt, and then I took a nap with the cat.

If I had NOT just gotten a booster shot, and I thought I were getting sick, then this would feel pretty ominous. But because I DID get a booster shot, it feels good: just enough miserable to feel like the booster is probably working its booster magic.

My to-do list has gotten formidable, and I have been checking things off—the booster shot is one example. I am doing the pell-mell method, which is to do whatever strikes me as doable, even if it is not The Most Important Thing—because getting ANYTHING off the to-do list is helpful, and because Getting Things Done seems to lead to Getting More Things Done. Adrenaline also helped me to prioritize a couple of moderately urgent car-related things, which was a relief; the car is now all set for awhile, one hopes.

It feels as if just as I am getting things ticked off my to-do list, the house is falling apart. The wifi has been slow/intermittent; the bathroom fan is getting really loud; the outdoor temperature sensor has stopped transmitting to the indoor receiver despite a battery change. The other day we turned on the living room light, which has been flickering despite having the bulbs changed, and we lost power to the entire house for a few seconds. That doesn’t seem good. We’ve taped down that lightswitch with masking tape so we won’t accidentally use it as we attempt to lure an electrician to our house someday in the future. Meanwhile the living room is dark, and we got rid of most of our floor lamps when we moved to a house with overhead lighting, so there was a problem to solve.

I thought I would see if I could solve the problem Swistle-Style—like, what if I were living alone, what would I do THEN? I don’t have to FIX-IT-fix-it to make it BETTER. I thought about collecting the floor/table lamps from the few places that do still have them—but then those places would be dark. I went into the barn to see if maybe I had kept a few floor/table lamps after all, because that seems like something I would do, but no. My eyes fell upon the extra Christmas lights we bought two years ago during our first pandemic Christmas, when Elizabeth asked if she could have a turn decorating the Christmas tree: we tend to do a tree with colored lights and a hodge-podge of miscellaneous ornaments, but Elizabeth likes white lights and matching ornaments. I didn’t see why not, and so she chose the usual white lights but also accented with these inexpensive $10 globe lights:

(image from Target.com)

After I attempted to use them to light the living room, I went to read the reviews, and if you go read them too you can probably see why I found them so soothing: I was not the only one finding the lights to be…sub-par. I was in possession of three strings, and after reading the reviews I gave up on the string that had lit up for 10 seconds and then failed, and instead used that string as a source of replacement bulbs for the other two strings, which each stayed lit but with 4-5 bulbs out and/or burning-so-bright-they-were-definitely-about-to-burn-out. And now the living room looks lovely, considering.

(It was hard to get a photo that showed the loveliness of the lights without the clutter of the living room)

The radiologist called me today and I answered the phone even though I was at work where I am not supposed to use my phone (if my supervisor had been in, I would have explained the situation after taking the call, but she was not in), and she said the sample from the breast biopsy was benign. So that is a relief, and how nice to get the news before the weekend.

In what might seem like a surprisingly fast pivot from relief/gratitude to carping/complaining, one of my co-workers has been out with Covid. She had not been wearing a mask. The co-worker who sits within a few feet of her, who also does not wear a mask at work, was today coughing steadily. Meanwhile, another of my co-workers came back to work five days after his positive test, saying it doesn’t matter that he’s still positive on rapid tests, because “those only measure antigens.” I DON’T FULLY KNOW WHAT EXACTLY AN ANTIGEN IS OR WHAT EXACTLY THE RULES ARE EITHER, BUT I DON’T WANT HIM BREATHING HIS POSITIVE BREATH NEAR ME

I feel as if I am losing my mind. I am still wearing KN95s to work, and that is NOT AT ALL COMFORTABLE TO DO in an active job, but I am doing it because it still seems to me like a very sensible thing to do. My supervisor and our library director are also wearing masks, but cloth ones, which I have been seeing FOR QUITE A WHILE NOW are no longer recommended (cloth is reportedly better than nothing, but not great at protecting against the new variants, and much less useful overall in a pandemic stage when most people are no longer masking nor distancing nor working from home nor limiting travel nor limiting the number of people in a space nor etc. etc.), and they take them off frequently to talk or eat/drink. My co-worker who used to make companionable remarks to me about how she and I were the only ones still wearing masks, has now stopped wearing a mask, because she got Long Covid, and now when she wears a mask she starts gasping and coughing and feeling like she can’t get enough air. When she stopped wearing a mask, so did the two people who work under her—even though she is a VIVID EXAMPLE OF WHY WE WANT TO DO WHAT WE CAN TO AVOID LONG COVID (THE RISKS OF WHICH MULTIPLY EACH TIME YOU ARE INFECTED). I feel increasingly embarrassed and stubborn to still be wearing one, but again: IT STILL SEEMS TO ME LIKE A VERY SENSIBLE THING TO DO.

Back to the topic of the biopsy. The biopsy site is still sore two days later, but not VERY sore—more like, I do notice it, and I try not to bump it against anything. Now and then I do a move that quickly registers as Unwise, such as pushing myself up off the floor with that arm, or snugging an armload of books against that side. I have worn a bra to bed two nights in a row, and I like that it keeps me from dragging the biopsy site against the mattress when I turn over. I haven’t had any trouble sleeping on that side, though I start out each night avoiding it. The steristrips are still on snugly, and I don’t feel inclined to remove them. I have an undramatic yellow-and-pale-purple bruise about the size of smallish cookie—an Oreo, or a Chips Ahoy.

I have been feeling a little MORTAL about this whole experience. It felt like a little test-run.

We have been having some cat and human medical drama, nothing with a Terrible Ending as of yet, nothing with Covid involvement; the title is a spoiler but I will tell the stories.

The week before last, Paul took Henry on The City Trip, where Paul and kids/kid take a train to a far-enough-to-be-fun city and do fun tourist things for a week, and they follow Paul’s vacation preference that they not eat anywhere they have the option to eat at home (I am more the “eat at Taco Bell because I am already at my limit for newness” type of traveler, though I WILL eat adventurously AND enjoy it IF someone else handles the arrangements, and Paul is good at handling the arrangements). He took Rob and William on this trip when they were in the 11-13 age range, and then took the twins when they were about that age, and then Henry’s trip was planned for summer 2020 and so you will not be surprised to hear it was canceled. And last summer didn’t feel safe, either. And this summer didn’t feel safe EITHER, but there apparently comes a time. So they went, bringing masks and Covid tests, and they had a great time.

On Friday morning at their hotel (not yesterday-Friday but a week before that), right before they were due to catch the train to head home, Paul started having what he thought was probably kidney-stone pain. He managed to get himself and Henry to the train THANK GOODNESS (the first text he sent me wasn’t clear on that, and my reaction was GET TO THE TRAIN, GET TO THE TRAIN, FOR THE LOVE OF GOD GET TO THE TRAIN AND THEN WE WILL FIGURE EVERYTHING ELSE OUT); and William and I drove together down to the train station, and then William turned around and drove my car back, and I drove Paul’s car (including Paul and Henry) back, because Paul was in too much pain to drive. Since then Paul has not been able to go to work, and has been doing a lot of groaning and writhing and pacing. But he’s had kidney stones before, and they have passed without medical intervention, so he felt he could cope. (I was not sure I could cope.)

Meanwhile one of our cats has been losing weight again over the last few months, and also started sometimes peeing outside the litter box. He went to a substitute vet (our usual beloved vet wasn’t available for a sick visit that day) who prescribed antibiotics in case this was an easily-treated UTI; and then a week and a half later we saw our usual beloved vet for his annual exam (I didn’t trust the substitute vet and was glad we already had the annual exam scheduled) and she suggested an ultrasound and a more intensive pee analysis, which was scheduled for this past Wednesday.

That same Wednesday, Paul had a doctor appointment scheduled because the kidney-stone pain was continuing and it seemed like time to consult someone, but we ended up canceling that appointment because he went to the ER instead. William had to drive him, because I was dealing with the cat’s appointment and also Elizabeth’s annual pediatrician check-up. If Paul had been willing to wait an hour, I could have driven him; but it had gotten to a point where he did not want to wait an hour.

So we had Paul at the ER, and the cat at the cat hospital, and I didn’t know when either of them would need to be picked up. “At the exact same time,” is of course how it turned out.

By then Paul was on an IV of painkillers/anti-nauseants and sending perky gossipy updates from the ER (“They’re boutta put a woman in restraints, I think.” “Oop, there she go!”). When he first arrived, they’d told him they were completely full so they would try to find an EMT to check him out, but then I think his pacing/groaning got him bumped up the list, so they put in an IV and put him on a gurney in the hallway along with several other patients they didn’t have room for. He did get a CT scan (I was worried they would send him home with painkiller and a referral and no scan), and they said the stones are 8mm, and they said 4mm is generally the largest a person can handle without medical assistance. They gave him a prescription for painkillers, a prescription to relax various tubes/muscles, and a referral to a urologist.

Meanwhile the vet called me with the cat’s results. She said this second ultrasound (he had one two years ago) confirms that he has one kidney that has basically shut down and another that is compensating, which is a perfectly sustainable situation for a cat or a human as long as nothing else happens. The bad news is that something else has happened: he had a bunch of kidney stones and they were piled up in his urethra. (There is another large stone lodged in the kidney that has shut down; she thinks that might be WHY it shut down.) She further made it clear to me in her tactful way that the two choices were surgery or putting him down: this was a situation that would lead to A Bad Crisis at some point likely very soon; she described him as “a ticking time bomb.” She said she was going to try to rearrange her schedule the next day so that she could do the surgery then, because she didn’t want him to have to wait until next week; she did manage to do that.

It is tricky math to figure out how much money is worth it to save a pet—similar to figuring out which repair is the one where you sell the car, but more fraught. In this case I came down on the side of paying for it: he’s only middle-aged, he is a beloved cat, the cost is Within a Certain Range, etc. This is the kind of expense where Paul soothes me by saying “This is WHY we EARN money: to PAY for things.”

The cat, like Paul, was given a painkiller and a medication to relax various tubes/muscles. Both of them were stoned out of their gourds. The cat kept leaping up on things and MISSING, and walking along the edge of the counter with one paw slipping off the side, and falling into the sink. Paul kept singing operatic snippets of songs, and starting stories he couldn’t remember the endings for, and wanting to talk about WHY he might be feeling so much better, and misplacing his phone.

On Thursday morning, the cat had surgery. They first put in a catheter and used it to push the stones back into his bladder, and then did an incision and removed the stones from his bladder. He is recovering well. He is still telling us he loves us and asking us if we have ever really looked at our paws. He has what the vet calls “a very bad haircut” (shaved sides for the ultrasound, shaved belly for the incision, shaved wrist for the IV, and a shaved area at the base of his tail for the equivalent of an epidural). He has an Elizabethan collar he is supposed to wear whenever we can’t keep an eye on him. He has various prescriptions.

On Friday morning, two days after he went to the ER, Paul went to the specialist, who ordered more bloodwork (he already had bloodwork in the ER) and x-rays (he had a CT scan in the ER). That was Friday morning before a long weekend. The specialist did not call Friday afternoon as we’d hoped. Now it is Saturday, and we still have Sunday and Monday to get through, so if you have kidney-pain-reduction suggestions, Paul would LOVE to hear them. He has ketorolac and tramadol for pain, both of which he had to PRESSURE the doctors to give him (both the ER doctor and the specialist were going to give him NOTHING for pain), and he says the ketorolac works better but they won’t let him take it longer than 5 days and tomorrow is Day 5, and anyway it consistently wears off about an hour and a half before he can take the next dose; the tramadol doesn’t work as well as the ketorolac, also wears off early, AND makes him feel crummy; he’s also on flomax. (The cat is on gabapentin and prazosin.)