Variolation, part 4: Secondhand
Mar. 13th, 2021 12:51 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
brin_bellway[cw: illness, (arguably) venting]
(part 3)
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I tried to talk her out of it. I did.
I told her I could go to the butcher for her. I told her she could borrow my respirator if she really wanted to inspect the available Passover briskets herself. She wouldn't listen. All she listened to was the last-ditch attempt to at least get her to wear our last medical-grade surgical mask. It does not appear to have been enough.
It might be a cold. She says it feels the way a cold feels to her.
We'll find out.
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Meta-Boss seems to be upset that I gave him only 4.5 hours' notice of not being able to work this week. As if it were up to me. As if I wanted this.
He can blame the government if he likes: they *have* tightened the rules on when asymptomatic housemates need to quarantine. It looks like it might be specific to higher-risk zones like ours: the province-wide stuff is still saying self-monitoring, while the county-level stuff says to self-isolate.
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(edit: part 5)
(part 3)
---
I tried to talk her out of it. I did.
I told her I could go to the butcher for her. I told her she could borrow my respirator if she really wanted to inspect the available Passover briskets herself. She wouldn't listen. All she listened to was the last-ditch attempt to at least get her to wear our last medical-grade surgical mask. It does not appear to have been enough.
It might be a cold. She says it feels the way a cold feels to her.
We'll find out.
---
Meta-Boss seems to be upset that I gave him only 4.5 hours' notice of not being able to work this week. As if it were up to me. As if I wanted this.
He can blame the government if he likes: they *have* tightened the rules on when asymptomatic housemates need to quarantine. It looks like it might be specific to higher-risk zones like ours: the province-wide stuff is still saying self-monitoring, while the county-level stuff says to self-isolate.
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(edit: part 5)
no subject
Date: 2021-03-13 06:31 pm (UTC)*hugs or equivalent*
(Some very morbidly amused part of me wonders if COVID would come with the depression thing you get with a cold, if it's linked to respiratory symptoms in general for you or if it's something specific to the common cold. But of course it would be much better if you didn't have to find out.)
no subject
Date: 2021-03-13 07:18 pm (UTC)I don't think that's *quite* the pattern here. Mom *does* care a significant amount, and in *almost* all cases she puts up with the cabin fever and lets me run all her errands for her. It so happens that briskets are often of poor quality and I have no experience with distinguishing a good brisket from a bad one, so she really wanted to be able to see them upfront and firsthand. She's not confident that sending her some pictures over my new data plan would have sufficed.
No, I think the pattern to complain about here is more the complaints I've seen
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(Of course, if it *is* a cold, the respirator wouldn't necessarily have helped: it might have been a fomite. Maybe it was on those packages of deli meat she got while she was at the butcher.
Although even then, it would still have been helpful in terms of how worried to be...)
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>>Some very morbidly amused part of me wonders if COVID would come with the depression thing you get with a cold
Yeah, I've been wondering that too. It would be more obvious if you had seen the first draft, and how I then very deliberately replaced "She says it feels like a cold" with "She says it feels the way a cold feels to her".
(Although I might have done that anyway, since she's having the cold symptoms simultaneously as opposed to my normal sequential.)
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>>or if it's something specific to the common cold
I note that "cold" is a *category* describing a collection of diseases with similar symptoms. Which suggests that anything specific to the common cold probably isn't going to be very specific.
(I wonder if the non-depressive cold in 2017 was some obscure virus I'd never had before and don't react quite the same way to. The pattern of symptoms was otherwise identical, though.)
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>>But of course it would be much better if you didn't have to find out.
Indeed.
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Me: >>Meta-Boss seems to be upset that I gave him only 4.5 hours' notice of not being able to work this week.
I overheard Brother's conversation with *his* scheduler and that guy was just like "okay, thanks for letting me know", rather than Meta-Boss's response of "Very short notice". I think Meta-Boss is too accustomed to people who never take sick leave.
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Oh wow, she got a same-day testing appointment. She's leaving right now.
no subject
Date: 2021-03-13 08:04 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2024-01-18 08:18 pm (UTC)Update from 2024, having now lost my COVID virginity (*sigh*):
Current evidence suggests no! I have distinctly not been depressed during this illness! Ranking the diseases I have experienced from least to most terrible, and counting only the effects I have noticed thus far, I think I would put this below my mildest-ever cold and above my second-mildest (those being the two non-depressive colds I have had).
(I do wonder, given that said second-mildest cold was also the most recent one, whether there is a new pattern developing. It *may* be pure luck, or I may have outgrown the overzealous sickness-behaviour response, or perhaps now that I know more about how to reduce viral load my body has less need to pull out all the stops.)
Still, regardless of whether it's *purely* luck, I may not be so lucky next time. (God knows there are a great many people in this world whose *first* COVID-19 infection went fine and it was the *second* where everything went to shit: one need only glance at Long COVID statistics to know that the world is not divided into the elect and the damned when it comes to COVID severity.) Let us hope the sample size remains small.
no subject
Date: 2021-03-14 04:50 am (UTC)