Blue-Footed Musings

Earlier this morning, I got so dizzy and headachy that I had to stop working. These symptoms might just be another round of the inner-ear problem that I’ve had in the past. But they are also symptoms of Covid, and because I have a runny nose, too, I have scheduled myself a Covid test.

How did I manage to find a test? A miracle, I guess. When I first tried to schedule an appointment this morning, every local testing site was completely booked up for the week. So I checked the other state testing sites. Except for a handful of Saturday appointments, there were no tests available anywhere until Sunday. I went back to schedule a Saturday appointment, and suddenly there was a testing site with open slots for every day this week, including today. I took a noon appointment.

The symptoms have subsided somewhat, and the bagel (that I’ve been slowly eating to quell my nausea) has helped. I no longer feel like I’m going to throw up and/or pass out, which is good, because I have to hit the road soon to make my appointment. My husband is going to drive, though. Every time I start to think that the headache is gone, I get a stab of pain through my eye, and if the vertigo were to return, I’d be unable to drive at all. Honestly, I doubt it’s Covid, but I almost hope that it is. Sometimes you don’t care which Devil is biting you as long as you know which one it is.

I try not to rant on the blog, but sometimes I just have to. Here is the rant that I wrote today.

I am mind-boggled over the tra-la-la attitude everyone seems to have about returning to work and school tomorrow. Transmission rates of Omicron are so high that anyone who goes to work or school is likely to catch it. But everyone else in this country seems to be perfectly OK with that. What happened to “flatten the curve”? Has anyone even looked at the curve lately?

The experts say that Omicron is different, but I’m not sure how much to trust them. For one thing, they’re basing their opinions on evidence from other countries that are smaller and that have different vaccination profiles and that aren’t even necessarily through their waves yet. Even if the variant is really milder, as it seems to be, a certain percentage of people will still have bad cases, not to mention that Delta is still out there, too. What happened to “everything counts in large amounts”? What happened to protecting the vulnerable? Have we just given up on all the ideas that guided us previously?

It’s so hard for me to judge, because we are getting mixed messages. Experts are saying that Omicron’s not so bad, because hospitalizations are barely up, even as hospitals all over the country are screaming, “We’re full! Help! Help!” Experts are also saying, “You’ll all be fine if you’re vaccinated and boosted!” even as we read every day about how many people are not vaccinated and/or boosted. They also neglect to mention that even the vaccinated could potentially get long-haul Covid. Has everyone forgotten about long-haul Covid?

Now, with many hospitals on the cusp of being overwhelmed, and with still large numbers of unvaccinated people out there, we are about to send everyone out to catch Covid at once. That’s like the dumbest, most irresponsible science experiment of all time. I want no part of it, but by law I am supposed to send my kids to school tomorrow.

I’m not sure what to do. The four of us are vaccinated and boosted to the extent possible. We will most likely be fine. So we should probably just proceed as normal. And yet, I can’t help but to keep returning to the idea that it’s stupid to expose everyone all at once to a disease that we’ve gone out of our way to avoid for two years and without being sure exactly how this is all going to play out and without extra protections for the people who might not be safe. Maybe we are all going to catch Omicron eventually, but we should at least try to stagger the cases more. So I am tempted to keep my kids home for the week, knowing that there is a very good chance that the schools will close soon due to staffing problems, freeing me from the problem of how to proceed in following weeks.

The question is now very pressing: will I send my kids to school tomorrow? I’m not sure. Probably? All I know is that I’m worn out from having to make this decision over and over and over. The variables are a little different every time, but the problem is always the same. We never have quite enough information, so the decision feels like a crap-shoot every time. Nobody should have to feel like they’re gambling when it comes to their family’s health and welfare. It was bad enough before, back when most people at least pretended to care, and it’s worse now that everyone seems to have thrown in the towel. Ugh!

We started our New Year’s Eve celebration at the Roger Williams Park Zoo. Their Holiday Lights Spectacular had sounded like it would be fun, if a mite expensive. It turned out to be a nice change from the free but uber-religious Festival of Lights that we usually attend. The zoo’s light displays featured not only the standard winter and Christmas themes, but also a lot of animal imagery, naturally.

After we finished our walk around the zoo, we ordered Chinese food for take-out and picked it up on our way home. The food was delicious. Later we watched an episode of The Mandalorian followed by just enough of the Times Square celebration to see the ball drop. I’m not sure that the kids see the point of watching the ball drop, which doesn’t surprise me, because I’ve never really understood it either. Some things we do simply because we always have (tradition!), and other things, such as watching The Mandalorian, we do because they’re fun.

Welcome, 2022! May you be like your Eve–full of light, good food, family, and fun.

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>.

Welcome to Day 23 of the 2021 Virtual Advent Tour, hosted by my friend Sprite at Sprite Writes. For this day of the Tour, I’m going to tell you about a silly Christmas tradition that my father and I have. One Christmastime, back when I still lived with my parents, we were talking about O Holy Night, a song that we all liked. I said, “I bet Pavarotti sings that one well.” Not long after that conversation, my Mom bought a Christmas Pavarotti CD. That CD got a lot of play, because Pavarotti did indeed sing the song well.

Too well, perhaps. My father and I enjoyed it so much that we couldn’t resist singing along. But we couldn’t sing it in our normal singing voices. No, a voice like Pavarotti’s demands a certain level of excellence. If you’re going to sing with Pavarotti, you have to sing like Pavarotti. You have to really belt it out in your best imitation opera voice. So that’s how we always sang it, and we cracked ourselves up every time.

It has been many years since we listened to that CD together, but O Holy Night is still part of our Christmas celebration. My father and I gather at the piano and sing our favorite carols, for which we use our normal singing voices. But when we get to the finale, which is of course O Holy Night, we sing it like Pavarotti. With each passing year our rendition gets more exaggerated and ridiculous sounding, and we still crack ourselves up every time. It’s one of the high points of the day, I think. My mother and husband do not seem to love it as much as my father and I do, though. I can’t imagine why. 😉

All jokes aside, O Holy Night is a beautiful song. Pavarotti’s version is still great, but these days there are many wonderful versions available. Do you have a favorite version?