Been a minute since I was here.

While I was away, there were a few more headaches -nothing serious; I assure you I have had a worse time with hangovers. I’ve had to clear my throat from time to time to allow my voice to operate at its best. Despite all this, I still identify as ‘asymptomatic’.

As one is wont to, I’ve turned to social media, checking out what people around the world (I am very very careful about using the word ‘experts’) think of the new wave. From the look of things, the World Health Organisation is treading carefully around the matter of how mild the Omicron variant is and you can’t blame them – it took them forever to acknowledge that we were in the midst of a pandemic and we’ve not looked at them the same way since. So while everyone seems to be declaring that this thing is not as bad as its predecessors, the body’s like, “Yeah, but, not really…”.

The Professor and Head of the Department of Pharmacy WHO Global Advisory Committee on Vaccine Safety has published some interesting articles over on LinkedIn one of which suggests an Omicron infection may offer protection against the Delta variant, which my limited understanding of science has me believe that this may kick that particular variant’s arse and take its place – if it continues being mild, this is not a bad thing.

Dr. John Campbell over in the UK has some interesting YouTube videos where he objectively looks at trends and shares his views on the same…the linked one features a guy from Uganda – yay us! His observations are also fairly encouraging… even with him saying that there’s a 50% chance what you think is a flu is COVID. But that’s in the UK, so who knows.

All in all, the hope is that this is not the calm before the storm and this silly variant won’t pull the rug from under our feet as it yells, “THIS IS NOT MY FINAL FORM”.

There are also some tweets that are pretty encouraging but in a typical case of “give with one hand, take with the other”, a tweep will talk about how awesome this is and how thankful we should be that EVERYONE’S GOING TO GET COVID- like an American* talk show host announcing a surprise giveaway (reach under your seats – do you feel that? Yes, Everyone gets an infection!) then turn around and make people question the importance of getting vaccinated, which is already a sore spot for some people, a lot of whom will decry it religiously.

I am worried, though, that once the ‘economy is opened up’, people will assume that means COVID is gone and thus drop SOPs. It seems to happen when lockdowns are lifted and now with people not suffering as much, you just know some idiot will ditch the mask and do everything they can to breathe in people’s faces. Don’t get me started on the anti-handwashing attitude that will come back to embarrass people years from now – “so, grandpa, what you want to tell me is YOU had to be told to wash your hands to avoid diseases?”

Oh, lest I forget, I did go to the hospital to have a trained professional ‘listen to my chest’ and tell me everything is alright. You could put it down to anxiety, but ever since my lung collapsed (many many years ago) I find myself taking deep breaths for reassurance. With COVID very much around, I’ve been doing that a lot more. . . I’ve also considered hemp tea, but worry I may mess up the preparation and actually get high, which in turn will trigger another bout of paranoia and we don’t want that do we?

So, the first hospital I went to seemed to have everybody that didn’t make it out of town for Christmas – no biggie. Heck, I even figured I’d sit through the whole thing and get it over with.

Then someone coughed.

It screams ‘bloody hypocrite’, for sure, but listen, until the ‘experts’ declare it’s impossible to get an Omicron reinfection in minutes and that your immunity is pretty solid for more than 6 weeks, I am going to freak out ANY TIME ANY ONE displays any symptom. Hell, if you so much as say, “I’m feeling funny”, I will not wait for you to clarify that you mean you suddenly think you have the potential for a career in stand-up. I’m out of there.

So I ended up at another hospital that asks you to declare whether you’ve interacted with people from areas that are COVID hotspots before finally asking you whether you yourself have had COVID and if you’ve been isolating.  They really ought to revise that questionnaire so that the foreplay is deleted and they get straight to, “DO YOU (THINK YOU MIGHT) HAVE COVID?”.

A lot of good the declaration did me, I still had to wait in line with another bunch of people (no coughers, thank goodness).

The doctor that attended to me was about as warm and welcoming as a piece of cloth and was about as interested in my preamble as an Uber driver would be in knowing why you are going to your person’s place. This being my drawn-out way of saying, she was bored – and given how long I took to get to that point, I can’t really blame her.

She did listen to my chest though and told me it sounded good. She seemingly ignored the mention of tingly sensations around the body, but I’m slowly making my peace with the fact that doctors know what they are doing…most of the time.

The CDC (the American one, do we have one here?) has suggested that Omicron sufferers (oxymoron coming up) who are asymptomatic can shorten their isolation period to 5 days from 10 – likely an endorsement for how mild this thing might be.

I do want to get another test done, but I’m a little cagey because of how I kept testing positive during the last attack – I later found out that you can test positive for up to 3 months even after your symptoms have left.

Maybe I’ll check tomorrow. It’s day 10… possibly.