So, to be honest, I can’t smell anything from May to August each year anyway. I suspect that no-one in Johannesburg can either. The dryness, the dust, the smoke and the inversion layer keeping pollution at face level, all conspire to create a perfect storm of nasal snottiness and stuffiness that rule out any sense of smell, even with addiction levels of decongestant nasal spray and antihistamines in play. So when my first cup of coffee of the day tasted watery and disappointing, no alarm bells went off, in fact I blamed the blend, the grind and the extraction of the coffee machine for the poor level of taste sensation. Then later at work, I ordered a cappucino from the canteen, in order to boost the day’s overall coffee experience and came to the enlightening conclusion that I should stop wasting R23 a shot on subgrade university canteen coffee. I had few expectations of the toasted sandwich I ordered later on in the day, as no-one expects a toasted sandwich from a univerisy canteen to be a gourmet taste explosion anyway, especially one that comes from a kitchen that makes such poor coffee.
It was only when I got home and washed my hands, as one should, that I realised that the fancy vanilla and verbena handwash that I keep in the kitchen was not delivering on it’s brand promise, that of an intense and uplifting fragrance offering. There is nothing intense or uplifting about nothing at all. Maybe if one of the first symptoms of Covid was a sudden loss of sight, we could have nipped the whole thing in the bud. Losing your sense of smell is a dangerous warning signal because unless you are a dog or a sommelier, you are unlikely to notice immediately.
So now I am a third wave statistic, so is my husband and one of my daughters. The other daughter was weirdly negative, even though she has been sharing a house and car with all of us and is the more affectionate of the two girls. She retired to her room and self isolated from the already quarantined household in a sort of double lockdown for ten days, although it was sometimes hard to notice as this is what teenagers do anyway and staying in your room and never coming out is the dream scenario for an introvert. The diagnosis shut down the younger daughter’s grade and the entire school orchestra. (The trumpet and clarinet are considered superspreading instruments.) We are now THAT family – instead of just being quiet about our infection and minimising inconvenience for all, we indulged in attention seeking confessions and ruined it for everyone.
My students went into panic mode and refused to come to campus, which is irritating because where do they think I got this from? The supermarket where everyone wears masks, sanitises on entry and social distances with their trolleys, or campus where masks are half mast to expel vape vapour and everyone hugs each other EVERY DAY in greeting, as if it has been forever, instead a couple of hours ago, that they saw each other at that bar in Parkhurst called the Jolly Spreader, where the music is so loud you have no choice but to yell into each other’s faces a hand’s breath away in order to be heard.
I actually burst into tears when the nurse gave me my results of my rapid antigen test, but she reassuringly told me that I would be doing the right thing by gravely inconveniencing everybody I had breathed on in the past week and possibly shutting down two educational and one financial institution, an orchestra, a karate dojo and a hairdresser. The family GP wasn’t so sympathetic, he sneered at the rapid antigen test and shoved a toilet brush into my frontal lobe instead. (The nurse who took my first test gently tickled the back of my throat with a feather.) He then quarantined us and wrote out a radioactive prescription for my husband. When my husband complained about the severity of the medication he was told, “this is the medication that you will be taking, your only choice will be to take it now in the comfort of your own home or later in the ICU.”
My two weeks of quarantine were two of the busiest but loneliest of my life. My husband retired to bed with his cortisone and slept a lot, and when he was awake he was not well enough to concentrate on the TV so he watched intolerable YouTube rubbish instead which kept me out of the room. The girls were now doing online school, so they were locked away in class for most of the day, after which they sulked and fumed in glorious isolation. Both were furious at us for getting sick and doing this TO them, as if they were grounded instead of quarantined. The maid was avoiding us, lurking in the kitchen wearing two masks and spraying Jik at everything, so I was stuck in my study with the marking, online shopping and the triple load of lecture preparation that goes with teaching remotely. Without my scintillating personality to keep them interested in the classroom, students require twice the amount of slides, pictures, videos, worksheets, cribsheets, encouragement and bullying to keep them going. My only gratifying interaction was with the GP who wanted us to Whatsapp him our SATS and heart rates twice a day, so twice a day I got a thumbs up because my SATS stayed above 96%. He sent us a big bill for this caring service.
Now the sweats and chills and coughing are over and we are left with the myocarditis and asthma as a reminder that we are now in the “recovery” section of the statistics. We have now got used to not leaving the house, and in my daughter’s case, not leaving her bedroom. In fact we no longer want to go out. It’s like Stockholm syndrome, we’ve stopped fighting lockdown and sort of, kind of, like it now.
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