Typhoid Laura

A Covid Scare Brings Out The Worst In Me

The other day, I was convinced I had Covid.

I’m vaccinated, but last week I started in-person teaching and I also got back from Nantucket, which required a round-trip ferry ride, during which I found myself unavoidably adjacent to socially undistant people. My symptoms: A slightly elevated temperature (99.1), a runny nose, fatigue, lack of appetite, and brain fog. Add to these, the general feeling of malaise and ratcheting anxiety brought on by being pretty damn sure I had Covid. Freaked out, I went online to see where I could buy a rapid over-the-counter test.

I quickly discovered that the most ones accurate are super expensive and involve shipping the swab sample to a lab and waiting days for results, and sorry, medical science, my anxiety doesn’t have that kind of time. I drove down to Walgreen’s and shelled out $20.00 for the rapid antigen test, which is reliable enough and gives you your results in 15 minutes.

If ever I had you believing I am a normal, innately good person, think again. I entered the store vaccinated and masked, and the cashier was masked and behind Plexiglass, but I felt like she might have been made uneasy by my Covid test kit purchase, so I told her that I am going on a trip and making sure I’m okay because I don’t want to get anyone sick. She nodded. I’m not even sure she heard me. The thing is, even as I was in the process of lying about why I was buying the kit I was thinking, why I am I lying?

I got home and pulled out the kit, which had eleven steps. Even though the steps were simple, they were sequential and specific. When panicking, I am all over the place and vague, making me and the kit a terrible fit. I asked Sam to help, and after doing everything to his annoyingly painstaking exact specifications, I got to the point where the test strip was sitting in the swab sample mixture and we were just waiting. I remembered back to the pregnancy test I’d taken for Micah, my sixth and most unintended child, watching the plus sign at first faintly, then indisputably, appear, and feared the same. But no. There was no pink second line indicating the presence of the virus, only a single blue one, telling me I am an alarmist and more recently a liar who is out $20.

Still, I am happy to be Covid-free. It’s also a good thing for all of us that my pathological need to please isn’t contagious.