Quarantine Diaries

 Just before Christmas the thing that we had worried about and prepared for happened.  My spouse, an ICU physician taking care of a dozen patients who had COVID, tested positive for it himself.  We had etched out a plan for this in the early days of the pandemic, but as the months slipped by and we had negative test with each COVID symptom that emerged, we started to feel like we might get through it.  Once the vaccine became available we felt like there might be light at the end of a still lengthy tunnel.  COVID, however, had different plans.

On the eve of Christmas we had to enact our COVID plan to live under one roof separately but together.  We had to regather the masks, the cloves, the hand sanitizer and start masking up at home.  Luckily we had been doing it for months at work, so it didn't feel totally weird, and amazingly, we had choreographed it beautifully.  I did the food preparation, and delivered trays of food to the COVID patient.  We set up a table and chair so he could eat upright.  I left the kitchen so my son could eat but that was as close as we got for 2 solid weeks.  In the end, we managed to keep each other healthy and not go crazy.  The only silver lining is that we finally decided to get our groceries delivered, maybe even after the pandemic.  So have a plan, think it out, and hope you never need it.  But if you do, it will not be terrible.