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Jul. 25th, 2023 11:57 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
brin_bellway[cw: (fairly strong) illness, venting, death]
welp, looks like Mom caught an influenza-like illness during her outing on Thursday
and mistook it for one of her frequent flareups-of-medication-side-effects the first day (Sunday), so we didn't start taking any precautions until yesterday when she developed a fever
(and of course by we I mean me: Dad is still *sleeping in her bed*)
she tested negative last night but that doesn't mean much these days, COVID-19 has been under a *lot* of selective pressure to evade rapid-antigen tests and it's not uncommon for modern strains to not show up positive until day 5 or so
---
it doesn't feel real
(yet)
which I guess is why most of my emotions are subconscious tension and stomachaches and difficulty concentrating, rather than outright conscious terror
---
...also in writing this it occurs to me, in that detached first-stage-of-grief sort of way, that she might actually die
it is by no means unheard of for a 61-year-old with an increasingly complex constellation of chronic health problems to straight-up die from even the relatively weaker ILIs
(it took her like a *month* to recover from the cold that went through the household in January, a cold that was solidly within the Top 2 mildest colds *I* had ever had)
...I had better dig up information on antivirals: I've been kind of unconsciously ignoring them because *I* lack the legal status of High-Risk Person, but *she's* legible
---
okay I looked it up, you need a positive test result *but* the fancier lower-false-negative-rate COVID tests are still available for High-Risk People only
I have sent her an email strongly recommending that she do another rapid-antigen tomorrow, seek pharmacy testing if negative, and go straight to getting a Paxlovid prescription if positive
---
...also, uh, apparently High-Risk Person now includes anyone who hasn't had a vaccine (nor infection) in the last six months
guess when my last shot was
November
...so on the one hand that's kind of distantly terrifying, but...uh, yay legibility in the event that I catch this, I guess
of course who's to say I haven't already caught it
welp, looks like Mom caught an influenza-like illness during her outing on Thursday
and mistook it for one of her frequent flareups-of-medication-side-effects the first day (Sunday), so we didn't start taking any precautions until yesterday when she developed a fever
(and of course by we I mean me: Dad is still *sleeping in her bed*)
she tested negative last night but that doesn't mean much these days, COVID-19 has been under a *lot* of selective pressure to evade rapid-antigen tests and it's not uncommon for modern strains to not show up positive until day 5 or so
---
it doesn't feel real
(yet)
which I guess is why most of my emotions are subconscious tension and stomachaches and difficulty concentrating, rather than outright conscious terror
---
...also in writing this it occurs to me, in that detached first-stage-of-grief sort of way, that she might actually die
it is by no means unheard of for a 61-year-old with an increasingly complex constellation of chronic health problems to straight-up die from even the relatively weaker ILIs
(it took her like a *month* to recover from the cold that went through the household in January, a cold that was solidly within the Top 2 mildest colds *I* had ever had)
...I had better dig up information on antivirals: I've been kind of unconsciously ignoring them because *I* lack the legal status of High-Risk Person, but *she's* legible
---
okay I looked it up, you need a positive test result *but* the fancier lower-false-negative-rate COVID tests are still available for High-Risk People only
I have sent her an email strongly recommending that she do another rapid-antigen tomorrow, seek pharmacy testing if negative, and go straight to getting a Paxlovid prescription if positive
---
...also, uh, apparently High-Risk Person now includes anyone who hasn't had a vaccine (nor infection) in the last six months
guess when my last shot was
November
...so on the one hand that's kind of distantly terrifying, but...uh, yay legibility in the event that I catch this, I guess
