The waiting game.

I’m typing this into my phone in a back alley in Windsor while listening to exile on main street, waiting for the doctor to come out and do my COVID-19 test. It’s One of the strangest experiences of the whole pilava. Many people have had tests already, hundreds of thousands but this is my turn to go through it.

It’s like you’re the news. You’re one of the potential’covidiots’ who didn’t listen to all the warnings. But you’re not, until you’re tested positive. The placebo on the stress level walking into this is extraordinary. While I’ve only had very mild symptoms of drowsiness and cough in the past 24 hours, the doctor and I reckon it’s a good idea to test to make sure. She’s about to come out. I’ll come back to this after it’s done.

Fast forward a bit over 24 hours.

I'm done. I tested negative to the virus. It was just hay fever. The 24 hours wait was stressful. Like so many of the hundreds of thousands of people who have tested negative, I had times where I was convinced that I had the virus. I distanced myself from the family and thought through how I was going to answer the contact tracing people. Like, you need to be honest when you speak to them. That's obvious. But there's something in human nature that tempts you to be a little reluctant with the truth.

But none of that needed to happen.

A weirder thing was how my symptoms of runny nose, cough and general sluggishness, disappeared on hearing the news I was negative. Minutes before my brain told my body that I was sick. On the news, instant recovery.