A third of Scots have Covid, but that’s a guess, really. It’s hard to escape the feeling that getting tested is being made deliberately difficult, so that Governments can pretend normality has returned. If you have symptoms, stay at home and shut up and thole it. If you’re really old, just accept that you’re going to die. We’re not spending money on giving booster vaccinations to anyone but a select few until the autumn. Masks are for wimps and the paranoid. Come on, gigs and restaurants are better for the economy than a few elderly or vulnerable getting culled…
It’s more than six months since my last (third) vaccination. I’m 66, have had two heart attacks, take a daily cocktail of drugs to keep blood vessels open and blood pressure under control, and suffer from asthma periodically. I live with a doctor and for more than two years we’ve painstakingly kept free of infection and the surgery has as a consequence remained open. Masks everywhere until the last few weeks, constant testing. I haven’t had a cold. Transient Ischaemic Attack, yes, provoking a drastic review of my celebrant work (nobody likes a celebrant to expire during a funeral) then six weeks ago, a questionable LFT test. Little obvious illness, but count it as an immunity booster, why not?
And then…
Day One. Saturday
Very busy week, council stuff, licensing board, a very short notice funeral (personal requests, couldn’t say no) conducted this morning, another three days away. Negative LFTs for the past two days. We can still get the tests as Susan needs to keep her GP surgery open and is testing regularly. Anecdotally, infections are rampant throughout Shetland, but hardly anyone is wearing a mask in public. I do in shops, but not at council meetings. If I wear one to someone’s house, and they invite me to remove it. I do. We’ve been for a couple of meals out amid maskless cruise ship passengers
Home after the funeral (most folk maskless) and exhausted, which is normal, but weirdly achy. By mid-afternoon I’m coughing, a lot and slightly unsteady on my feet. Overnight, it gets a lot worse, and sleep is replaced by periodic dozing, peculiar dreams cold sweats and a very (non-cardiac) sore chest. Shivering, sudden hot blasts of fever and more sweating. Suspicions aroused.
Day Two. Sunday
5.00am and an LFT test so positive it seems to be actively furious with me.
Groggy and nauseous, cough worse and no appetite whatsoever. Every joint is sore. My hair hurts and I have earache. Emails to everyone I can think of warning that I’m testing positive. Unable to conduct the next funeral, now two days away. Thank goodness Hilary, humanist celebrant, can do it. Susan cancels planned trip south for grand-daughter’s birthday. She’s testing negative.
I feel progressively worse. Headaches, tiredness of a strange, foggy kind that leaves me unable to read, watch TV or bear conversation. I go to bed and doze uneasily, get up, find it difficult to stand. Drink water, tea, more water. 8.00pm go to bed for the night, but again it’s this cycle of dozing and blank staring at the ceiling. Like bad meditation. Where did this come from? Who have I potentially given it to?
Day Three. Monday
Susan still testing negative, but has developed a cough. I have a sore throat and my nose is running like a waterfall. Daughter phones from Glasgow. She’s been a Covid ICU doctor since the pandemic began. “Sore throat, cold symptoms? That’ll be Omicron, then, not Delta…” Another day of increasingly chest-wrenching coughing, difficulty in breathing. Fortunately an old steroid inhaler is to hand. Bed, doze, stare at ceiling. Shiver, shake, sweat. Manage to eat something. Deluged with intensely detailed old memories. The wallpaper of a Lake District bar in 1978. The smell of mum’s Singer Chamois car. A band called Deep Concern in Hamilton Town Hall, maybe 1970. Long dead dogs.
Day Four. Tuesday
Susan still negative but beginning to exhibit same symptoms as me. She’s managed to arrange a PCR as she’s due back at work on Saturday and will have to sort out cover if she’s positive. We have enough food for the moment but will need to get more supplies soon.
Now I have dreadful gut problems. Daughter confirms this too is part of the deal. Completely debilitated, but after half a day things ease a bit. Coughing is worse, though. Paracetamol helps a bit. I’m on anticlotting drugs anyway for cardiac reasons and this is beefed up with aspirin as clots are one of the really catastrophic issues with Covid. Taste is off. Small Talisker tastes like cheap Lidl Islay. Probably a mistake
Day Five. Wednesday
Susan has had a truly awful night, sick and coughing and sore and sleepless. I manage the first proper sleep of the week, and wake at 7.00am, feeling generally fluey but for the first time in days connected to my surroundings, able to hold a conversation. I start reading Adam Sissman’s Le Carre biography, borne along through David Cornwell’s appalling childhood. Things could be worse. And they are. Susan’s PCR is positive, though her LFT the same day was negative. Today an LFT is positive too.
I send apologies to pensions committee and full council meetings. Suddenly, it’s announced that the legendarily male, and famously thrawn Lerwick Up Helly Aa is to be open to women from next year. I dismiss this as a hallucination but no, it's really happening. Susan in bed, about two and a half days behind me in symptoms. I make soup, bake bread, start writing this. Read a piece in the Guardian about the huge rise in Covid infections, waning protection from the vaccinations, the fact that Omicron and Delta are (a) vastly more infectious than ‘old’ Covid and (b) you don’t get immunity from getting the disease. So this could all happen again, and pretty quickly too. Good grief.
Vaccine deniers pop up on my Facebook timeline, suggesting masks are useless and what did I expect from getting those jags. Blocked, them and their pine needle tea. After this, it’s full on masks in public places for me. Washable FFP2s ordered.
Day Six. Thursday
Always a hope that this could be a first day of negativity, but no, another furiously positive LFT. Slept better though, unsteady on feet again. Chest ragged and liquid and the constant coughing has lost me six pounds in weight. Still exhausted. Fall asleep for two hours after breakfast, sitting upright. Susan has dreadful earache and backache. We order food from the local shop and the splendid Evelyn delivers it to the porch. Oil arrives too from Highland Fuels. More than I paid for mySkoda Octavia to top up the central heating tank. Manage to read, but by evening the endless coughing is becoming really wearysome. Susan about 36 hours behind me but perking up quicker. My voice has now plummeted to the depths sounded by Leonard Cohen on his last album.
Day Seven. Friday
Marginally better at first but still racked with coughs that shake me like a Citroen 2CV smeone’strying to run on paraffin, on a sub-zero morning. No radio show tonight. Having to cancel a planned tour of Northmavine with food writer Diana Henry next week, and it looks like Susan will have to cancel surgeries. Family visit at start of July beginning to look questionable. Susan feeling a lot better but still positive. The fact that Omicron does not appear to offer significant immunity against reinfection (only October’s much promised booster jag will) is incredible discouraging. We’re being asked by our governments to treat this like flu, and a lot of people aren’t even testing. Vulnerable people are becoming really ill or dying and it’s a political decision. An appearance of ‘Normality’ at literally any cost. Hey, it’s Glastonbury! Breathe in!
Bowl of cereal, coffee and then suddenly all the week's symptoms come surging back: sickness, breathlessness, diarrhea, muscle pain, cramp. Back to bed. Is there no end to this? Sleep for three hours.
Am on Dexamethasone, which has certain similarities (the ‘Dex’ is the giveaway) to the kind of recreational drugs maybe a very few unwise Glastonbury performers are clearly still imbibing. I skim the BBC streams: Crowded House awful (that old Gretsch is done, Neil, chuck it) Plant and Krauss (with JD McPherson) sublime, Primal Scream…disconnected, but the Jesus and Mary Chain all kinds of awesome. East Kilbride rules. Crisp, tight, loud and those wondrous tunes. Last time I saw them was 1986, 15 minutes of mayhem at the Barrowland.
Radio Four’s Any Questions was held live at the Lerwick Museum theatre tonight with an invited audience and imported guests/host. Ill-advised doesn’t begin to cover it.
Day Eight. Saturday
Up at five as if a switch has been thrown. Test positive but feeling a lot better and my chest has less of a barbed-wire-and-burnt-popcorn feel.
I may go out. Alone into the open air. Signs are that we are facing a major wave of infection now in Shetland and Scotland and the Scottish Government is looking at restrictions being brought back. Omicron is slithering under your door…I decide that for the foreseeable future, all my council duties will be conducted via Teams or widely spaced and heavily masked. No public buildings unmasked.
Friends in touch to say they’re infected “but it’s like a mild cold.” They’re lucky. But the variants will mutate and they will come again.
Covid is here it's never went away
Covid is here it's here to stay
Covid is here vaccination triple hit better than a pair
Covid is here you look with a frightened stare
Covid is here where's the curfew & look after the n.h.s.
Covid is here it will have you & me next
Covid is here where is Jason litche
Covid is here not sunning itself on the beach
Covid is here no more lockdowns
or sitting on a park bench
Covid is here the economy is bigger than you & me so why cant you see
Covid is here COVID IS HERE CCOOVVID IISSS HHEEERRE!
Awful for you both. Hope situation improves quickly. I had it end of last year, due to similar health problems I was sent to Edinburgh Royal Infirmary. Horrible experience. I was shocked at how lax they could be and the other patients moaning sense of entitlement was embarrassing.
After reading your post I'm going back to wearing a mask.