First published in the Chronicle and Transcript
By
Esther Baird.
Well Regular Readers, I’m typing this from day nine of quarantine, or to be more precise, isolation. When you are a close contact to a person with COVID-19 you quarantine. When your whole family goes down like a raging infectious ball of corona-fire, you isolate. Here there be dragons, or at least COVID particles.
The tri-town pandemic response nurse, who was calm and kind when I was stunned and semi-hysterical (hard to imagine, I know) asked about our first symptoms to help establish our timeline. But when everything is a possible symptom (and everything is with COVID), it’s hard to remember. Did you feel achy, or was it just the way you sat? Was that a runny nose, or just the post nasal drip you’d had the last three months from living in blighted New England? Was there a headache? Indisputably yes, but was it from COVID or from a year of pandemic slowly turning your brain into something closer to Chickarina soup (the only soup Stop and Shop sold during those early pandemic months for reasons I hope are good, or at least better than the soup).
Everyone said getting it all at once worked in our favor. We could be on the same basic 10-day timeline and therefore free together — just in time for February vacation week. Thank goodness, because let me tell you, what our family needs right now is some time together with no structure. Maybe a few more nights at home with no place to go and a fun family movie we can all disagree on. Oooh, ooh, I know: what about a game night where we don’t play any games and just stare at our phones!? Anyone?
Ok, so we’re a little stir crazy. Many of the COVID days are a hazy memory of sleeping, Advil and snow. Like Ma Ingalls when the family all got sick, some things you just have to keep doing, like shoveling, whether you have the actual plague or not. I’ll refer you to the blighted land bit above.
Our youngest daughter lost her sense of taste and smell pretty quickly and we didn’t think anything of it since we’d heard it was a common symptom. But the next day I kept getting whiffs of a strong smell I couldn’t place. I’d been lying on the couch a lot … I sniffed my shirt, was it me? It was a distinct possibility. But when I took the dogs outside, and smelled the cold night air, I almost couldn’t breath. The whole world of freshly fallen snow [again] smelled…
“Like a subway!! It’s ammonia! Everything outside reeks of like a hot day in a subway, or like a porta-potty at the beach in the afternoon when…”
“Ok, I think we got it.” My husband chimed in.
Nausea was not a symptom any of us were dealing with, and I guess he wanted to keep it that way. But obviously I felt the need to tell everyone all the things that smelled like ammonia: my coffee, my water, a cheese stick, the granola bar, my shower gel, my toothpaste…
We were all glad when I fell into a long fevered nap and the ammonia machine was muted.
The next day I woke up and the ammonia was gone and replaced by a true, and total lack of smell. It was a relief to be honest. But it has made cooking tricky. I can’t tell if things are seasoned properly, if at all. Too salty? Too spicy? Stale? Sour? Don’t know. Hope you like dinner, I have no idea what it is, and to be perfectly honest, on day nine, I don’t care.
Tomorrow we break free. And after a full year of living under the threat of getting the virus, we now know we won’t… at least for a couple months. There’s not much we can do with that freedom except drive over a state line and back again without quarantining or testing. Look out world we’re driving a few miles north to another state!! We’ll try to contain our excitement.
It’s been a long year, and the last 10 days have been the longest. We’re thankful it wasn’t worse, though I think we were surprised by how tough the virus was, even for our more mild cases. And now we’re ready for whatever is normal these days. We’re ready to get back to a world where the dragons stay on their side of the map, and the ammonia stays in the cleaning closet (if it even needs to be in the house at all) and a headache can just be reserved for all that snow.