I plan for this to be the penultimate entry on my fight against COVID, one which had become so personal. Day eight had not been disclosed in its entirety. I had organised a COVID test for Fi. It would have been a sense of deja vu had it not been for the contrasting drive. Lockdown was not over, yet the cars were out in their hordes. The traffic was comparable to the pre-lockdown era. Where were all these people going? No wonder, we will end this pandemic with the highest deaths in Europe.
This morning, she got the test result: negative.
It didn’t make sense. Here was someone who had been in the same cosy household as a COVID positive person, developing clear symptoms of fevers higher than I had ever achieved but without the clinical proof of infection. It became almost suffering without point. For me, it felt as though we had both studied together for the same exam and whilst I had achieved a distinction, she had just missed the pass mark.
I had been counselling a friend who had been in a similar position with classic symptoms who had tested negative twice. I struggled to empathise with her feelings of anger and frustration but I understood now. I tried to reassure Fi, that if she were my patient, I would be advising her to self-isolate for a full week because this had to be a false negative. Then I began looking it up. I read some sources which claimed a false negative rate of up to thirty percent i.e. in a hundred people truly positive with COVID, thirty may get a negative result. That made sense, in our household, the false negative rate was fifty percent.
Fi felt like a fraud and it was sad for her to think that, given she had been sicker than I had been. I could only suggest that hopefully the antibody test comes out soon. Had I tested negative, her result could have been one of relief, instead she was reluctant to even talk about it and this made me realise false negatives were an emerging stigma that required awareness raising. How should we approach this, I wondered.
But the bottom line was, we were both better and that was the only thing that mattered. Further good news too, was that my sense of taste had undoubtedly returned and I grasped the opportunity. The grapes in the fridge now tasted sour as Fi had said a few days ago, but I loved it – I would cherish sour grapes hereon. My tea did not need sugar any more, though I did leave the teabag in the cup. Dinner was tortellini and the black truffle really came out amongst the middle-class flavours but most importantly, the hollow chocolate eggs tasted exactly as I expected them to. For me, taste had returned and I certainly was not going to bite into a lime to prove it. Now it was just a matter of reacquiring smell.
Every few days... 