Last Saturday, early in the morning when I checked my email and found my positive Covid-19 test result, I skittered around the empty downstairs (all the kids still asleep) gathering up everything I thought I’d need. Laptop and charger! Library books! Rocking chair and footstool! The bills I pay on Saturday nights! Snackies! Water cup! The load of clean clothes from the dryer! Allllll the stuff I’d brought downstairs from my room when only Paul was isolating and I was camping out downstairs! I also did a bunch of hasty downstairs tasks: brewed coffee; gave the cat his pill; started the dishwasher; gave the cats a fresh water dish. And I refilled my weekly pill container, and today I’m taking the last set of pills, so here we are, nearly a week in my room.

The first day was GRIM, mostly because I was so upset with Paul (who seems to have finally understood why, and has admitted to wrongdoing), but also because I was adjusting to the news (being negative on so many tests for so long! and then suddenly the word POSITIVE), and also because I was worried I would be getting sicker (that has not come to pass, as of yet). Days 2-5 were pleasant: I enjoyed the forced downtime; I enjoyed nestifying the room (laptop HERE, charging station THERE, a pad of paper for making lists of things I need from downstairs HERE…); I enjoyed watching TV. I did not enjoy feeling like I had lost connection to the kids (I have been text-nagging them, but it’s not the same), but I did enjoy not making their dinner.

Days 6-7, I have been getting a little restless. I’d thought I didn’t like having Paul as a roommate, but once he was gone I felt lonelier, and more cut off from the household. The novelty of being in my room is wearing thin. I’m feeling some dread at the put-off tasks that are building up. But I know I am very, very, very, exceptionally very lucky to have had so few symptoms and to be spending this time getting a tiny bit bored of phone games and Office re-runs, rather than feeling terrible and trying to take care of small children and/or other people feeling terrible—or, of course, worse, being in the hospital and so on.

I am so grateful to all of you who, on the last post, mentioned that actually 10 days of isolation is not the Absolute All-Clear I thought it was. This is one of the things I SO VALUE about this group: it can be hard to process the ONE MILLION INFORMATION that’s out there, and it is much, much easier to hear someone just say the one relevant thing: in this case, that it’s after 10 days AND A NEGATIVE RAPID TEST—or better yet, two negative rapid tests on two consecutive days. When Paul, who was going on the “5 days all-clear but 10 days if your wife is a paranoid weirdo” advice of the CDC and his workplace, came home from work after his first day back, I gave him this new information, and he was…surprisingly resistant. But did eventually take a rapid test, and it was negative, and I was glad, because I would not have wanted to isolate with someone who was clearly thinking “BUT WHAT IF THIS MEANS I HAVE TO GO BACK INTO ISOLATION??” instead of “Oh no, what if this means I came out too early and have been endangering others??”

I am still doing well. I am enjoying my forced stay in my room. There are inconveniences, yes, and things I would like to be able to do, and so forth. But overall I am very well suited to this. It reminds me a little of being in the hospital with Edward, but without the constant interruptions. I play Candy Crush. I mess around on my laptop. I read books. And here, unlike in the hospital room, I am in charge of the TV remote.

Kids still don’t seem to have caught it. (Though we’re going on only symptoms and rapid tests, and if I were going on only symptoms and rapid tests for myself, I still wouldn’t know I was positive, and would be at work every day potentially spreading it.) I am so glad that as soon as Paul tested positive, I wore a mask in the house and stayed out of rooms the kids were in, even though that was pretty uncomfortable and inconvenient. Really, each thing we did that seemed over-the-top and silly at the time, later seemed sort of bare-minimum.

Paul wondered if “we” were going to try to make tacos tonight as usual, and I said I didn’t know but I was not, and then he started asking a lot of questions, and after answering a few of them I said I ALSO was not planning to guide someone through the process step-by-step remotely from my room. Like, I don’t mind answering a few questions, but this was “Well, what needs to be thawed?” on a day it was too late to thaw anything so normally I would go to the store to get non-frozen meat instead, and I get THIS kind of ground beef and THIS kind of ground turkey and this much of each, and I start the rice at 4:15 with this much brown rice and this much white and this much water, and so on. No. Make them your own way or else skip ONE SINGLE TACO NIGHT JEEZ.

I heard yesterday that at least two other people at my work are out with Covid. I worry that they blame me: I WAS at work for two half-days while unknowingly positive. I wear a KN95 mask to work; a few coworkers, including the two who are now sick, wear cloth masks; most coworkers don’t mask. My job doesn’t bring me within 6 feet of anyone for more than a few seconds, let alone 15 minutes, let alone however long it takes if one/both are masked. But the timing works out for it to have been my fault, so I worry they think it was my fault. And who knows? Maybe it WAS my fault, maybe this variant spreads through a mask and at a great distance and in mere seconds. I have had to say to myself “This is nothing you can do anything about” one million times.

Paul hit the 10-day mark yesterday or actually probably the day before but we were being conservative, so he’s back out in the household; this morning he went back to work in person. [Edited to add: We should have made sure he had a negative rapid test before he came out of isolation; thanks to everyone who let me know this important detail I’d missed. Luckily, when he came home from work he DID test negative on a rapid test, but that was a tense time wondering if he’d spent the day infecting the kids and his co-workers.] The kids are still mostly staying in their rooms, especially Elizabeth, who seems to be taking this to extremes considering she sits in a room with a bunch of unmasked, back-in-school-5-days-after-testing-positive-even-if-still-symptomatic kids all day at school. But it can be different to feel unsafe in your own house, so I am not bothering her about it.

Rob has decided that he would like to live in Seattle, so he is sending out resumes and looking online at apartments. (He is hoping to find a roommate, so if you have a recent college graduate ALSO looking at Seattle, or already in Seattle, EMAIL ME.) I am very fretful about this entire thing. I keep having to remind myself that I never even went home after college, just launched right out and got a series of jobs and apartments and bank accounts and so forth. It’s just, he keeps giving me indicators that he has not done the equivalent of reading the instructions on the medication bottle. He was asking about someone being able to drive him to the airport, and I was like “THIS airport, right? Not THAT airport?” and he was like “…Oh.” Also, he seems to be doing things in the opposite order I would: FIRST, arrange ride to airport; SECOND, arrange flight; THIRD, find apartment; FOURTH, find job! Also, this is such different real estate circumstances than when I was looking for an apartment. And does he know how expensive it can be to live in a big city? Well. Well. Generations of new adults have launched, and made their own mistakes, and for the most part it has worked out fine in the long run.

My positive PCR test was Thursday (results came back Saturday), so today is…well, Paul’s workplace calls the day of the positive test Day Zero, so let’s use that way of counting, so then today is Monday and also Day Four. I am still not particularly sick. If I hadn’t had a positive test result, I would still consider this to be at “probably allergies/reflux” levels: just an irritating little cough, easily taken care of with tea and/or cough drops. I hesitate to waste the rapid tests; I also kind of want to take one every single day as if to say “NOW are you showing the positive??? NOW are you???”

Speaking of rapid tests, I don’t know if you know this but some health insurance companies are covering a certain number of them. I was talking about this with a friend, because she was startled to discover by accident that her insurance would cover four tests per person; she doesn’t know if this is per month or a one-time thing or what. My prescription insurance (it’s separate from our health insurance) will cover eight tests per person per month. (It’s Express Scripts, in case that’s useful information.) We can either get them at the pharmacy and get reimbursed, which seemed like a hassle, or we can click a button on our online account and get them shipped directly to us for free, which seemed like less hassle so that’s what we did. I didn’t get ALL FIFTY-SIX we could have gotten, but I got twenty-four. Then, when we started actually using them, I ordered more.

Paul is using a rapid test each day; it’s still showing positive. He is on Day Eight. He is still congested, and doing some coughing, and doing some dozing, but he basically feels normal; at this point he said if it weren’t pandemic times he would LONG SINCE have been back to work (and he IS back to work today remotely).

I told him directly that I was angry and sad; that I felt he had put his own comfort and convenience ahead of our health and safety; that he had deliberately concealed that decision from me, KNOWING how I would feel about it. He said, “Yeah—I thought it would be okay, since like 99% of my coworkers are vaccinated.” He seems to think that was an adequate response to what I’d said. It seemed like he heard me, but that he didn’t think any of what I said was a big deal. I feel as if perhaps I am losing my mind.

Furthermore, on the day we now know he was exposed (Thursday before last), a group of colleagues from another location came to his workplace directly from a large conference in the area, and conferred with Paul and his coworkers for several hours. That’s when dozens of people at Paul’s workplace were infected, because apparently few of them thought “mixing with new people who were recently at a large event” was a good moment to consider using masks and distancing. Paul’s workplace is the kind of workplace where no one bothers to use Dr. because pretty much everyone has a PhD, and this is not the first time it has occurred to me that they’re not as smart as they think they are.

The kids are periodically taking rapid tests just to check in; so far they’ve all been negative. None of the kids have any symptoms; Edward seemed to have a funny voice on Wednesday or Thursday like I did, but it didn’t develop into anything and it went away by the next day, while mine continued and turned into a cough.

Some of you asked if Elizabeth had fun at prom and I would say YES, though I think she also discovered what I remember discovering, which is that the REAL fun of prom is shopping for it, and preparing for it, and seeing everyone all dressed up, and taking pictures with people. After that, it’s pretty much the same as any dance from back in middle school. I am not authorized to share photos, but I thought she looked very chic, and she got a lot of attention for her outfit. She remarked that she keeps forgetting how cutting off all her hair makes all her fashion choices seem more dramatic and edgy.

There was a little Drama, because…wait, did I already tell this story? That she was going with a friend group, and then one by one everyone else in the friend group ended up acquiring a date? So then she was the only one going on her own, and the plan for group pictures got tanked because everyone chose to get photographed with their date’s friend group instead of their own; and also the plan for everyone to go piled into several cars got ditched, and she didn’t want to be a third wheel to any of the couples, so she had to drive herself. (I offered to drive her, and she said getting driven to prom by a parent was even worse.) And ALSO it seemed that all her friend group got invited to an after-party that she did not get invited to. I was aware that none of this was mine to fix, but it was pretty stressy.

But it all turned out well. The tiny coolness that developed between her and the friends who got dates and ditched all their plans meant that she sat at another group’s table at prom, and it was a table of cool (the theater/band kind of cool) mostly-seniors who then invited her to THEIR after-party, which she attended, and they played video games and had snacks and everyone left by midnight, and she got home safely. And she DID still get some pictures with the original friend group, because whoever planned the prom knows that the pictures are one of the best parts, and set up several photo-taking locations.

This morning, Saturday, I got an email with my PCR Covid-19 test results from Thursday: positive. I also took a rapid test this morning: negative.

Would it be useful to review the timeline?

Last Thursday: Paul, negative PCR test (test and results on the same day through a workplace program; he had an additional negative PCR test earlier in the week; he was, as we were notified later, a close contact on Thursday to someone who tested positive Friday)

Last Friday: Paul and me in the car for 8 hours, Paul feeling fine

Last Saturday: Paul and me sharing a hotel room, Paul feeling fine

Sunday: Paul and Rob and me in the car for 8 hours; Paul feeling bad; Paul positive rapid test; Swistle negative rapid test

Monday: Swistle negative rapid test

Tuesday: Swistle negative rapid test

Wednesday: (no test, because not going anywhere and no symptoms, and three negative rapid tests in a row)

Thursday: Swistle weirdish throat/ears, like maybe allergies or maybe coming down with a cold; little bit of a cough; PCR test midday

Friday: Swistle’s symptoms do not worsen; Elizabeth goes to prom, wearing a mask, after five days’ worth of negative rapid tests and staying in her room and wearing a mask in the house when she had to come out to fetch food to bring back to her room

Saturday morning (today): Swistle PCR test results come back positive; Swistle rapid test still negative

Paul, incidentally, is still testing positive on rapid tests. (He used the other one in the 2-pack I opened this morning.) He was Fairly Sick (fever, just dozing and watching TV, didn’t even touch his phone/laptop) on Sunday evening and Monday, sort of middling sick on Tuesday, and mostly better on Wednesday, I think, though already I am losing track. He has felt pretty okay since then, though still napping and coughing—but basically he’s in the bored stage of isolation now.

I am now isolating with Paul, and I don’t know if that is the right thing to do. Should I instead be isolating at a motel? But that seems silly: it seems like positive members of the family would isolate together. It IS nice to have normal access to my stuff again, instead of camping out downstairs; it IS nice not to wear a mask all day every day. Other than that, it is sub par. I am new to isolation and still settling in, and also Still Pissed and so was enjoying some Time Apart despite the inconvenience; so I feel like I am just trying to put my stuff away and get organized and figure out how to manage this, and he keeps TALKING and EXISTING and BEING RESTLESS in my vicinity.

It’s too late now, but what we COULD have done is gotten PAUL a motel room near his workplace. They think he should come back 5 days after a positive test, so they could have him. Then I could have this room/bathroom to myself. Plus, what if by some fluke the PCR test is wrong (like by swapped results or notification error, if false positive results are pretty much impossible) and the negative tests are right, and now I’m positively STEEPING in the air I’ve been vigilantly avoiding since Sunday? But we’ve already been sharing air in here for 8 hours, so. And also, I am not keen on the idea of spending so much money for him to stay in a motel and eat takeout for a week or whatever, while I am here, possibly getting sicker and trying to manage the household from isolation.

So far I have NOT gotten sicker. I have a mild irritated cough that sometimes gets caught in a little cough loop where I need to cough for a little while, but no worse/different than I have with seasonal allergies or with the tail-end of a cold or even with my reflux; “endless nagging cough” is historically one of my most common illness symptoms. I’ve also had very little appetite the past few days, though I had chalked that up to (1) lingering rage, (2) adrenaline, and (3) wearing a mask in the house and being reluctant to take it off even to eat—and those all still could have been contributors. I haven’t lost taste or smell yet; no fever yet; no unusual tiredness yet. (I was up past midnight waiting for Elizabeth to get home from prom, so I am a little tired today and that keeps catching my alarm: “Wait!! I feel tired!! …Oh, right.”)

I’m feeling very uncomfortable with being so unavailable to the kids, and so unable to do things in the house. We’re lucky the kids are all older, and in fact the oldest four ALL have driver’s licenses and can do things such as grocery shopping. Really, they are basically adults, and in earlier times would all be married off by now and running their own farms. But without SEEING what needs to be done, it’s a little difficult even to remember everything I do, so that I can delegate it. I’m also feeling very sad to be positive. Just, really sad about it.

It seems as if we should take the kids for PCR tests, since my rapid tests were negative and my PCR test was positive. But for the younger three, they have to have a parent/guardian with them. We COULD go, in a car with the windows all open, wearing masks; but right now we are just going to take a minute to think it through. No one has anywhere to be until Monday anyway.

I let work know that I’d had a positive test result. I’ve been so focused on AVOIDING Covid, I don’t actually know what the work protocol is now that I’ve gotten it. I don’t know how many days I’m supposed to be out, or what the requirements are for coming back. I might have it in an email somewhere. I THINK we’re supposed to stay out for 10 days, but it’s changed a few times and may now be something else.

This was originally going to be a post titled What It Was Like To Attend a Child’s College Graduation (long, boring, and uncomfortable, with about 10 seconds of huge excitement), but on our way home from that, spending 7-8 hours in the car together after spending another 7-8 hours in the car together two days before, Paul said he was feeling a little carsick (he never gets carsick) and wanted some of my little motion sickness patches. (I would never have bought these except that Chrissy Teigen said they worked, and other people replied that they’d tried them and also found them effective, and I don’t really believe that they COULD work, except that they seem to, and what am I to make of that?) By the time we arrived home, he felt Very Off, and took a Covid-19 rapid test, which immediately turned positive. I had not even had a chance to PEE AT HOME yet, and Paul was texting me a picture of the positive results.

I went to find him, and he was sitting, unmasked, in the indoor air of our house, looking glum. I did not scream “WHAT THE HELL DO YOU THINK YOU ARE DOING?? ISOLATE YOURSELF IMMEDIATELY!!!” but I did say, calmly and pleasantly, that he should perhaps do that, perhaps right this second. I preceded him up to our room/bathroom (he was so glum it took him a minute to heave himself up), got my not-yet-unpacked weekend bag, took the dirty laundry out of it, repacked it with a bunch of fresh shirts/socks/undies, got my towel and pillow, and skedaddled.

It has taken me a few days to tell you about this development at our house, because I have been so angry at him. It turned out he had stopped wearing a mask at work, without informing me of that decision, let alone consulting with me about it. He still would not have told me about that decision, even after testing positive, but he accidentally dropped a context clue while telling a work anecdote, and I asked him about it, and he took a long pause while presumably considering lying about it. [Edited to add: I feel the need to clarify that I do not KNOW he was considering lying about it. Perhaps his brain just got stuck on the puzzle of figuring out how I would have known to ask the question.] He knew the kids and I were all masking at work/school and in all public indoor places. I had told him I didn’t want him coming to stores with me unless he wore a mask. He knew how I felt, he knows he has an immunocompromised child, and he made two choices: (1) to not wear a mask, and (2) to withhold that information from the rest of his household, so that we didn’t have the information we needed to keep ourselves safe. Now I am wearing a mask in my own house, because he wouldn’t wear one at his desk job. Prom is this weekend, and if Elizabeth tests positive and can’t go, you should expect unseasonable storms to sweep the region/nation. We have made other risk decisions (whether the kids should go back to school, whether I should go back to work, whether we should attend Rob’s college graduation) together, often with the involvement of the kids, but this one he made on his own and it belongs entirely to him. If Covid had spread through our house as a result of one of our shared decisions, I would have accepted that statistical consequence of our statistical accepted risk, but what happened here is different.

I wish to communicate to you how serious this is to me. If I or one of my children experiences Dire Consequences because of this secret deliberate choice of Paul’s, my feeling is that it would lead to divorce. I am reminded of the book The Poisonwood Bible, in which (and it’s been a very long time since I’ve read it, so I am aiming only for the gist here) a woman puts up with her husband’s decisions (which, granted, are more dramatic than Not Wearing a Mask at Work), even though she feels they are bad decisions and tells him so, until one of his choices means something bad happens to one of their children, at which point she packs it all up and leaves instantly. Just: crosses that decision line, exactly at that moment, simple and clear and Done.

In the meantime, I am doing almost zero sickroom care: this risk of illness was his own private decision, made with ONLY himself in mind, and so presumably he was prepared to also deal privately/personally with the consequences, as I attempt to run the rest of the household and prepare for the rest of us also dealing with those consequences. (I will OF COURSE modify this policy if he truly needs care. But right now he is the type of sick where he would like me to check him solicitously for fever, and listen to him talk in detail about his symptoms and how they have changed since he last told me, and run up and down the stairs fetching him the foods his mother used to bring him when he was sick, and all of those options are OFF THE TABLE.) (I did BUY saltines and soup and applesauce and little yogurts and so forth when I was at the store, but I did not imbue that service with love, and in fact withheld it.)

Besides: it is better for his overall health and well-being if I am not in his vicinity right now. My rage diminishes a little bit with each day that goes by with no additional positive tests or symptoms, but it is in no way gone. And we are not in the clear yet, and I don’t actually know when we ARE in the clear. I tried to look it up, and found that a test will be positive 2 or 3 or 5 or 7 or 14 days after a successful exposure/transmission—so at what point could I conclude that I have NOT gotten it? Weighing risks/benefits as best I can, which is not very well, I think I might stop wearing a mask in the house after prom (assuming I still have no symptoms and am still testing negative), though I’ll consult with the kids about that. Not only is prom the current highest-priority event to anyone in our household, but by then it will have been 5 days since Paul tested positive, and presumably I was well-exposed before then.

And we can hope that the fact that we were away for the weekend at Rob’s graduation, leaving the other kids home, is what will spare the other kids. Paul would have been at home Friday and all weekend, breathing out air, but instead we left Friday morning and weren’t back until Sunday afternoon. And Rob had Covid at college a few weeks ago, so it is likely he is not yet vulnerable to it again. It may be that only I was exposed. And I am wearing a mask, staying out of rooms where other people are, testing regularly, and sleeping on the sunporch. I have had three negative rapid tests so far (Sunday, Monday, Wednesday), and have a PCR test scheduled for tomorrow. I keep thinking my throat is getting sore and that I have a cough, but it’s allergy season and the sunporch is full of drafts bringing salutations from the trees/shrubs/grass outside.

If you are interested, here is what the kids have decided to do. (The youngest turns 15 this month, and all of them can do some basic cooking, so it’s pretty different from the way we might have made decisions when they were little and needed more active parental care.) Rob and William are not masking in the house, and they would mostly be staying in their room / away from other people anyway, so not much change there; they are not very worried about catching it, I think in part because they have both recently come home from college experiences where “vaccinated young people getting Covid but recovering quickly and without much fuss” was common. Elizabeth, Edward, and Henry are all wearing masks except when in their rooms, and staying in their rooms as much as possible, except Edward will sometimes hang out by himself on his favorite couch spot in the living room. Elizabeth in particular, I have seen only out of the corner of my eye since Sunday; Edward and Henry are more casual, and I think are mostly wearing masks because Elizabeth and I are wearing them.

I had not forgotten what it was like to be sick, or at least hadn’t forgotten any more than I ALWAYS forget what it’s like to be sick (a fresh surprise every single time: how minor a cold seems when you DON’T have one, and how major and miserable it feels when you DO), but it had been such a long time. Two years without anything more than seasonal allergies and political stress hives!

I don’t know how I got whatever it is I have, but probably at work. I touch a lot of things that other people have recently touched. And I wear a mask at work, but there has been such a long stretch of focusing on an illness that spreads through the AIR (and feeling exasperated at measures designed to carefully wipe down surfaces instead), and so I may not have been as vigilant as I should have been about, say, not rubbing the corner of my eye when it was itchy, or whatever.

Anyway, I am sick. Sore throat, cough, sneezing, runny nose; a mild fever (highest was 100.5) yesterday and the day before, but gone today. My hope is that I am on the upswing, because yesterday I didn’t feel like sitting upright for very long, let alone having thoughts or typing words, and today I have had several lie-downs but am also up for typing some words. I took a rapid Covid test on Saturday morning: negative. Another rapid test Sunday morning: negative. I went for a PCR test yesterday [update: negative]. [Update: rapid test Thursday morning negative.]

I don’t know anymore when to go to the doctor. Before the pandemic, my feeling was that when you get sick, you stay sick for awhile, and unless something is Very Alarming and/or Very Specific (a fever of 104F, for example, or a very painful ear), you wait for it to go away; if it won’t go away in what feels like a normal amount of time, or if it BECOMES Alarming, then you go to the doctor. But this worldview also involved going to work while sick, of course. Which, at my current workplace, finally, finally, FINALLY is at least CURRENTLY actively discouraged. When I called in, my supervisor thanked me for not coming into work. (Compare this to my bakery job, when I called in because I was throwing up, and my supervisor asked me to come in anyway. To work with food. Or my in-home eldercare job, when I was coughing and running a low fever, and they told me they really needed me to come to work anyway. To work closely with elderly people.) But still, even in a supportive environment: I don’t know how many days a person can miss work before they go to the doctor and get told it’s just a virus.

I also don’t know how our new “People should stay home when they’re sick!!” idea goes with jobs that have no sick pay, and no available staff to cover the positions. It seems like without support (sick pay, available staff), this is just scolding people for doing what everyone knows they need to do. I know this is not a new thought; it’s just that we are over two years into this and I haven’t seen any action, even at my workplace that has theoretically shifted its view. I don’t have sick pay. We don’t have anyone to cover for me when I’m gone, so my co-workers, who already have their own jobs to do, have to do my work as well as their own; this obviously puts pressure on me to return as quickly as possible. But I don’t know what the solution is, since it also doesn’t make sense to have extra employees hanging around just in case someone calls in sick.