Rant #3,033: B--I-N-G-O

B-I-N-G-O!

Yes, this wonderful year of 2022 has left my family and I with one more gift before it bids adieu—

I have COVID.

As you know, my wife has recently had it, probably gotten it from our time on our cruise ship vacation, and even though we took the greatest precautions, I got hit by it too.

I started feeling weird on maybe late Thursday, but honestly, I didn’t think much of it.

I though it was my allergies acting up again, but even though I got through Friday, in the evening, all of a sudden I got the chills and felt sick.

Then yesterday morning I was tested, and lo and behold, I got it.

I don’t feel what you call “terrible,” but I don’t feel like myself at all.

My nose and throat are ragged, and yes, I continue to have trouble sleeping.

The doctor said that my case is a mild one, and he didn’t even prescribe me any pills to rid myself of this thing; he just told me to fight it with regular, over-the-counter aspirin.

My throat isn’t sore at all, my eating is good and yes, I guess I am doomed to slapping on the Castro Convertible until the end of the year, but that is where this thing stands now.

If this is a mild case, I can only imagine what a bad case is, like what my sister had right at the beginning of the pandemic.

And what my wife recently had was much more severe than what I have, and she is up and about and went back to work this past week.

She says she is just a little stuffy, but otherwise, she is OK, thank God.

Me, I am contagious through December 22, and then I have to wear my mask and take every precaution for five days after that, so I am looking at December 27 as my due date to be rid of this thing.

And to have it happen right before Hanukkah …  I could not have chosen a worse time to get this.

In addition, I have to postpone all the activities I had planned for this week … I now have to postpone my son’s blood work, my own dental appointment, and a test that my mother needs as part of her neurological makeup.

And right now, our son doesn’t have it—he has a cold, but nothing more--and my mother doesn’t have it, so we are good with that.

As I have said before, my wife probably got this thing in the gym on the ship, but we will really never know how this came on.

We live in “the virus doesn’t exist and I am not getting shots” prime territory here on Long Island, so she could have gotten it anywhere, but most probably, I picked it up from her.

We are in close quarters here, so I guess if she got it, I was inevitably going to follow her, no matter what we did to try to stem its movement.

We are concerned about our son, who does have his usual winter cold right now, but he has gone to work, has bowled with his team, and appears not to be affected by this, at least right now.

My mother is protected by her being pretty much partitioned away from us by her being in the lower level of the house—with us on the upper level—and we have spoken by phone and that’s it.

I don’t think COVID travels along phone lines.

Funny, this is the first time in my memory that I have been sick for Hanukkah, and for that matter, will be sick during Christmas.

I don’t know what time of the year I was sick when I was a baby and I had measles, but I don’t think that it was this time of the year.

So as we lit the first candle of Hanukkah yesterday, I was wearing both my yarmulke and my mask at the same time, for the first time, and hopefully the only time.

And I will be wearing both during the entirely of Hanukkah this year, which simply puts an exclamation point on another horrible year that my family and I have experienced.

Just when you thought that you escaped the year unscathed, this thing comes around, and it bites, and bites hard.

The only good thing about it is that it won’t effect my work at all; there is something to working remotely after all.

But I didn’t need to prove that to myself by getting this thing, and I hope it leaves my family and I as quickly as it came.

Let me show it the door … .