Blog entries from December, 2021

Tomorrow is the start of a new year, it is also the day that I am allowed to leave isolation as the weekend before Christmas was great, I went into the city for a number of podcast recordings and comedy shows, but what I didn’t know at the time was that I caught COVID-19.

I have since been in contact with people who were at the same shows on Sunday, some have also gotten it while others have not, it is quite variable. There is also a splash of irony to include as some of the talk over the weekend was about the new omicron variant and how maybe we shouldn’t be at an event crammed into the same room…

Monday was a typical day of working from home and even managed to fit in a few hours of gardening.

Tuesday also started out typical, then I went to get my booster shot and afterwards had a sore arm and a slight headache which cleared in time for me to meet up for a trivia night.

Wednesday started with a huge headache, so I called in sick and went back to bed. When I got up in the afternoon I still had the headache and now had a blocked nose, I was putting it down to reaction from the booster until I got an email from the venue saying that a positive case was at one of the shows, so I went to get tested. I’m glad I went when I did as it took about two hours to get through and that was before the huge delays that were coming.

Thursday was much the same with headache and blocked sinuses with added cough, so I stayed in bed. Then at 11:30pm I got a text message with the word POSITIVE and information on how to isolate.

Friday was better with less of a headache but still the blocked sinuses and cough, I again called in sick and in between laying down I spent the most time on the phone than I had in years:

• First up was a medical call asking my symptoms from when they first started until now and providing advice on what to do if things got worse
• Then there was a call from a group at Monash Health that partially repeated the first call but also explained that I would get a message each day to report the progress of my symptoms
• The final call was from the Department of Health about where I had been and who I had been in contact with.

That final call was the most surprising to me because of what they didn’t ask. They asked for details of where and when I had been to places, but this was all over the phone, none of it was using the data collected by all the scanning of QR codes. As the connection wasn’t the best and the more I spoke the more I coughed it took a while to get accurate information across. Even if the QR code data wasn’t being used, I would have loved to be able to type the info into a webpage…

There were also discussions with family as I would not be making it to Christmas lunch the following day. As it is my tradition to provide the ham I had already purchased the ham and related items. The ham was still sealed up so I put it outside for my mum to sanitize and collect, she then prepared it for Christmas lunch.

The next week was relatively uneventful but also surprisingly productive. I watched a number of comedy specials that I had been meaning to get to, and as I felt better I started on my annual deep clean of my house, one room at a time before moving on to some overdue gardening. It can’t be that bad if I am still able to disassemble and move around furniture…

The time between Christmas and New Years is never that eventful for me, I was already planning to do the cleaning and gardening, it was just a couple of social things that I ended up missing out on.

So here is to the end of another year and the start of a new one. I might stay up to watch fireworks on television, but I might also go to bed early…