Diaries of an isolating man: days 1 & 2

Day one:

After nigh upon 707 days, my unbeaten run against Covid-19 has finally come to a shuddering and sniffling halt.  A positive lateral flow test four days into 2022 is the sort of turn of events that makes the drunken wishes of a “happy new year” on Hogmanay sound preemptively ironic.

In reality, with the reported increased transmissibility of the Omicron variant, avoiding sickness over the Christmas period always seemed to be like Road Runner’s constant effort to outrun Wile E. Coyote: every so often the bird would be caught, but it never ended up quite as terribly for him as the coyote intended.

Aside from the obvious downside of experiencing an unpleasant illness, the worst part about testing positive for Covid is the requirement to isolate for 10 days.  My self-containment happens to be coming after a 13-day break from work over Christmas and New Year, which was an isolation of a different sort.  Boredom had already set in with that one around the same time as the first festive hangover started to wear off on the 27th.  I was looking forward to getting back into a normal routine with healthy habits and social interactions that don’t just take place across the bar.  The difference between this isolation and the one over Christmas, and indeed those through various lockdowns, will be that I can’t leave my flat to go for a walk, buy some milk or sit in a beer garden.  This is proper isolation, where the last person I will have had any interaction with for the next 10 days was the young woman at the test centre this afternoon who explained how I had to stick a swap up my nostril and make ten rotations.  I thought I was lightening the mood when I asked if I could at least pick which nostril, but it turns out that’s all I’m going to be thinking of for the next week and a half.

Since I am going to be stuck inside the modest four walls of my single occupancy for 10 days with nowhere to go, I have resolved to at least try and do some yoga to keep myself exercised.  I thought that a low impact, slow flow working on my hips would be something I could handle in the circumstances, but I was forced to give up after no more than fifteen minutes.  Not only was the flow of snot from my nose impossible to contain, but I struggled with stretching my legs as wide as the video demanded.  Though that was less to do with Covid and more an indictment of my own flexibility.  It was the same when I attempted a breathing exercise yesterday, when my symptoms had first developed, although on that occasion it probably was Covid that was making me sound like a hurricane blowing through a whistle factory.

Day two:

The Scottish Government today reduced the isolation time for positive cases to 7 days provided they take a negative lateral flow test on days six and seven, so without even trying I have already gone through a chunk of the isolation I was expecting to be subjected to yesterday.  It is a Pyrrhic victory, but in this situation, I believe in grasping any small successes.

Despite my efforts to focus on the tiny triumphs, I’ve been finding it difficult to fill the time during my first two days of isolation and I can’t help from feeling that I might have made a mistake by watching all of the films that I had been saving for the Christmas break. If I’d thought that I would have another 7 days at the end of it all I might have spread them out a bit more evenly so that I could savour them over time, like a carton of Celebrations. But, really, who lives life like that? So I was quite relieved when I remembered about the new three-part Beatles documentary Get Back that I had been putting off from watching because it is so long. Each episode clocks in at an average of 150 minutes, which should mean that by the time I have managed to watch them all, my isolation will be over with.

The preemptively ironic New Year celebrations

After sleeping longer than I have ever slept on a Wednesday, I got out of bed today and sought to reaffirm my commitment to continue with my yoga practice every day.  Following my troubles yesterday I wanted something a bit more mindful, as well as less likely to make my nose run.  The brain fog meant that some of my transitions weren’t exactly graceful, but I was able to last all the way through the 39 minutes of my chosen video.  It felt like a big deal, even more than waking up to find that my isolation had been cut by three days.  My Ujjayi breathing was a mess, of course.  Every time I exhaled through my nose it sounded like when you open a bottle of soda water very slowly.  But there was no snot nor a sneeze.  Today has been a good day.

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