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Well, it happened. We got that sh-t.
My husband and I drove just shy of 1,000 miles to escape the city and be with family in a more remote area for three months during the pandemic. We fled our apartment in a busy metropolitan area in the middle of the night with only five days’ worth of clothes when we heard people were getting into fistfights over toilet paper at grocery stores in March of 2020. We holed up in a cabin, developing true cabin fever, for a full fiscal quarter, trying to avoid the virus. On our way home to the big city, instead of having a real wedding as we thought we might one day, we eloped in Las Vegas – having our wedding over Zoom, with nobody present besides us and the minister. These were just some of the ways we let the pandemic turn our world upside down, so as to avoid getting COVID-19.
Then we came back to the city, nevertheless, leading a super isolated lifestyle. We both work from home. Only the grocery store gets either of us under a roof with people who aren’t from our household, and even then, we wear our masks and sanitize our hands the second we get home and after putting groceries away. Back in August, we treated ourselves to one weekend in an Airbnb with another couple – before which we all quarantined for 14 days and got tested. We were sort of the picture of pandemic perfection. And then, after all of that, just as social media reports started cropping up about friends in my age group getting the vaccine, something didn’t quite feel right. And I got this damned virus. I had always taken it seriously, but now that I’ve had it, I know that that thing demands our respect and our attention. Here’s what COVID-19 was like for me.
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My experience with testing
If you’ve been told the only way to make sure you’re negative is to get a negative test and then quarantine for a while, that’s not paranoia. The tests are not 100 percent accurate and foolproof. Anything but. Case and point: my husband and I got tested together. He tested positive. I tested negative. And then, three days later, I got all of the COVID-19 symptoms. But I could have told anyone that was going to happen. I didn’t buy it for a second when the test said that. I lived with a COVID-19-positive individual, with whom I share a bed and meals and kisses, and I somehow didn’t have it? Yeah right. Neither of us were shocked when it turned out that my negative test was pretty worthless.
