I was feeling rather punk this past week. Nothing serious but a little achy and kinda like I didn’t want to get out of bed. I decided to get a CV-19 test. It no big deal, took five minutes, and two days later the results came back negative.
Frankly the results were rather anticlimactic. My PhD in microbiology wife has been telling me I didn’t have CV-19. No symptoms, no fever, no cough, no respiratory distress, no loss of smell or taste, no nothing. The aches and pains, she said, were probably related to the home project last weekend, reinstalling a fallen curtain rod. It’s true a little ibuprofen helped a lot. Everything is not due to CV-19.
I’m trying to determine just what the test means. From what I can understand, it means I didn’t have CV-19 at the moment I took the test. But what if I left the testing site and went to the supermarket and ran into someone with CV-19 who coughed all over me. And I contracted the disease.
I could look at it from the position that the way I have been living my life over the past eight months has been OK. I wear a mask when I’m supposed to (in retail, while walking in my office building, at the doctors and dentist, while entering and leaving restaurants, etc). I social distance when required, I wash my hands, I use a spray on my hands when I can’t wash.
So the test tells me that I have been doing the right things for me, and that I don’t have CV-19 now. Had I tested positive I could have been quarantined, if it was serious enough, I could have visited a doctor, and in worst case, gone to the hospital.
I know people who have CV-19 active in their homes. One daughter brought it home from college and went to bed. The second daughter and the wife did not contract the disease, but the husband did (He was being quarantined in the doghouse.) Not everyone who is exposed gets the disease. By the way, the daughter is back in college, the husband is out of quarantine.
I refuse to let CV-19 rule my life. I’m not afraid of it. I respect it; I do what I can to not get it, but I will not let it control every aspect of my life (our betters in the government are doing a good enough job of that).
JVH
