Isolation life: Germy kids and a killer plot twist

Strap in folks, this is likely to be a long one.

This was written a little while ago from my ‘sick bed’. We are now on the home stretch and I’ll be out of isolation fairly soon and the kids back to school in a week.

I didn’t fancy splashing it all over social media for many reasons; I didn’t want to add to the panic and misinformation going around and the worry about getting tests. Also I wasn’t feeling up to arguing with COVID denying dickheads; they’re everywhere…

However, I have seen so many people telling others off for worrying needlessly and wasting tests, and people channelling anger at each other (rather than the incompetent Government that have failed to provide adequate testing despite having six months to prepare and making a lot of empty promises) that I thought I’d share what happened to us.

Please, please don’t use my probably extremely statistically unlikely, personal experience as an excuse to panic – OK?!

Here goes!

On Monday we had an email that there was a cough/cold going round my daughter’s bubble at school.

We were told not to worry unduly because although one child had gone for a test it was very probably just normal kid stuff, and not the dreaded ‘rona which we’d all just spend six months trying to avoid.

On Monday night/obnoxiously early on Tuesday morning, she woke up with a cough. She kept me awake all bloody night and obviously couldn’t go into school on Tuesday. Bugger. It had been one week before my previously never-missed-a-day-off-school child had succumbed to school germs.

On Tuesday morning, after pretty much no sleep, I tried to book her a COVID test and it was bloody near impossible.

It wasn’t just me; the kids went back to school and the number of coughs and temperatures had very predictably exploded. With schools having to decipher sloppy government guidance, many required tests before snotty, coughing children could go back to the classroom.

Subsequently the demand for tests also went crazy and, due to extreme governmental incompetence in outsourcing testing to someone’s in-laws I presume, the supply just wasn’t there.

I even got permanently suspended from Twitter because I called Matt Hancock a c*nt over it. True story. Not even sorry.

After about three hours of trying and refreshing the screen over and over, I finally managed to book tickets for Glastonbury get a drive through COVID testing appointment, about an hour and a half’s drive away.

I booked it under my name.

In my defence the form says ‘is this for someone else?’ and then asks for your name, and I do what I’m told. Then at the end it asks you to add family members to the booking. Evidently you should fill the form out as your child, not as yourself.

Not wanting to take the chance of losing the booking I added my daughter and kept my test slot and confirmed it, guiltily, even though I wasn’t actually eligible because I had no symptoms or reason to book one for myself. When I told Doug, he admitted he had done the same when he took our son back in August. It is a shit system.

Anyway, no word on a positive test from the school, assumed that everything was fine there. Yay!

The next day my daughter’s text came back negative. Hurrah!

Well, kind of Hurrah. I felt bloody awful about wasting NHS resources and even worse about getting my account booted off Twitter because I was a ragey twat. I felt really fucking stupid for kicking up such a fuss and being all mama-bear about it and so I didn’t really say anything about it, I just thought it was best to quietly forget about it.

Confirmed COVID- and fancy-free, my parents came to visit. We sat in the garden out of habit more than anything.

And then, an hour or so after they’d gone home, I received a text.

My COVID test was positive.

Shocked is not the word. Writing this, I’d had 4 hrs sleep, a hangover (obv, it was that kind of news) and a 2-day-late period brewing and I was FINE, not even a sniffle, no hint of cough, nothing at all. I felt great, despite everything. The same morning I started on a new week of C25k and I felt amazing afterwards.

I obviously had to call my parents and the school straight away, as well as contacting the two friends I saw last week, even though Track and Trace tell you just to contact those you saw up to 48 hours before the test.

I felt terrible about it; my parents couldn’t even get a home COVID test because of the current cock up. (Matt Hancock definitely is a c*nt).

Luckily they could isolate, as could we. I was quarantined in my bedroom and my whole family stayed fuck at home, so the spread if there was any stopped here.

I’m not worried about myself – obviously I am one of the lucky, mostly asymptomatic kinds. Unless it goes rapidly downhill, and it looks unlikely that I’ll get much apart from a snotty nose and a bit of a headache, aside from staying in my bedroom for fucking ages I hope to emerge unscathed.

But I shouldn’t even know. I should not have had that test. I was ineligible.

What if I’d not been able to get the tests at all? What if I’d have stuck to the rules? What if I hadn’t been so bad at using the website?

I had absolutely no symptoms of anything, and a daughter who demonstrably did not have Coronavirus despite the cough – we have the email to prove it.

If it had gone differently I would be booting them both back to school right now and swanning off for lunch, maybe visiting the gym, the dentist, the shops. My parents would be going to look after my 100 year old Grandad. It doesn’t bear thinking about.

So yes, schools and parents might be worrying unnecessarily.

They might be. But there is a small chance that they might not.

In my mind it’s better to get tested and know for sure; and if you can’t, that’s entirely the Government’s failing. It is not the fault of worried, stressed out parents doing their best to protect their families and their jobs. It isn’t the fault of schools who have to have policies to keep students and teachers safe. There shouldn’t be a hierarchy of who is more deserving of tests as there should be enough tests available for everyone that needs them.

Did I mention Matt Hancock is a c*nt?

(Stay tuned for the next episode in which I rip into Track and Trace. Honestly they couldn’t track, nor trace, their own feet…).