We arrived home Tuesday afternoon after a long drive back from Vermont. Nobody, us included, should have traveled for Christmas, and yet it seems like everyone did. Some people have characterized this as an “F it” attitude, but for me it was more like bowing to the inevitable. The reality is that we’re probably all going to catch Omicron, but we’re vaccinated, so we have at least some protection against it. My husband, my parents, and I weighed the risks versus the rewards and decided that a family Christmas was worth the risk.
My husband and I couldn’t get Covid tests for ourselves before we left for Vermont, but we were able to get the kids tested. The rapid-test results came back quickly (they were negative), but we didn’t get the PCR results until we got home. Fortunately those results were also negative. I would be freaking out right now if they had been positive. Knowing that you could and maybe even will inevitably catch Covid is not the same as being comfortable with getting it. I really don’t want any of us to catch it, especially not now. I mean, if everyone gets sick at once, who will take care of the sick people?
We have all had Omicron symptoms recently, of course: headaches, sore throat, stuffiness. All of those things are easily explained by other causes: lack of sleep, dry air, indoor allergens. Under ordinary circumstances, we’d just go about our business as usual and assume we were all fine. And really, that’s all we can do right now, too, except inside there is that insidious grain of worry, always there, trying to call attention to itself. Sometimes it wins, but mostly I have been able to keep my mind on other things. Mostly.
But, as we were driving home, we got a call from my husband’s sister. Her daughter has Covid right now, poor thing. I called on Wednesday to check in on them, and my niece was doing well. She was just a little stuffy and running a low-grade fever. Today my SIL called to let us know that she’d been tested and that the rapid results were negative. So far, so good. I am keeping my fingers crossed for them, and also for the rest of my husband’s family, because they were all exposed when they got together for Christmas Eve.
Tomorrow we have tickets to go to a local Festival of Lights. It’s an outdoor event, but we might wear our masks, just to be safe. After that, I’m thinking about hunkering down for a while. Maybe we’ll just do a couple of big grocery runs and then stay home for a few weeks.
Meanwhile, we’re creeping closer and closer to the end of vacation and the start of school. My SIL’s school system is considering a return to distance learning, and I’m frustrated with our school system because we haven’t heard anything from them. It’s getting ugly out there (the national daily average of new cases is over 300,000!), and while I may be resigned to the idea of catching Omicron, that doesn’t mean I should invite it into my home. If we send the kids to school, they will almost certainly bring Omicron home with them. Come Monday, we may have another really tough decision to make <sigh>.