That’s why I don’t feel great

Today explained why I was feeling so wiped out yesterday. I woke up and was feeling worse than yesterday. I was aching a lot, but I didn’t have any cold-like symptoms, so I continued to assume - as I have been doing for the last few days - that I’d overdone it this week. A message from the Tai Chi class leader:

"I have to cancel the Christmas class tonight. I have annoyingly become sick with a cold and am in the infectious stage, so I don’t want to spread it to everyone just before Christmas."

I did the first couple of meetings, and a call from Dad (where I asked them to look over the parcel that’s scheduled to arrive tomorrow), before I saw a message from one of our Polish colleagues who said he’d got COVID, and that’s when I wondered.

We have had some tests sat on top of the bookshelf for a long time, and I pulled them out. They are valid but very close to their expiry date. I had to merge a couple of vials of liquid to get enough to run the test, but after half an hour, I had a clear positive test. I joined a work call just after it went positive and got a lot of sympathies. I have no idea where I picked it up, but on the timescale, I am assuming it was at the Christmas party. But, given the message from Tai Chi, maybe I picked it up last Wednesday.

It’s very frustrating as, this close to Christmas, it looks like I am still going to ‘have it’ over the holidays. It might put a bit of a dent in our plans to host Christmas. Officially, the NHS guidelines are saying that I should ‘avoid contact with other people for 5 days after the day you took your test’, which would mean I’d clear on Saturday. But for those with a ‘weakened immune system’, we should leave it 10 days, and I think that would cover some family members. I feel terrible (both ill and about having people change their plans because of me).

Everything got steadily worse throughout the day. I started sneezing and had a runny nose. I spent the latter part of the day watching the mini-series ‘A Spy Among Friends’. I managed to cook dinner: curry using up a lot of the veg we had. I tried to make it as spicy as I could while making it edible in the hope that a bit of heat might help me sweat out some of the cold-like symptoms.

I tried to go to bed early, but it didn’t make much difference as I struggled to sleep. It was quite hard to settle the symptoms. I ended up finishing the series, which was based on the true story of Kim Philby’s defection to Moscow, and in spite of my pounding head, I thoroughly enjoyed it.