When it's positive to be negative

“Accentuate the positive, eliminate the negative” says the old song. And don’t we always have a friend who comes around, if we’re feeling low, attempting to cheer us up by telling us to stay positive? Ah, for the days when that was good advice. 

Like so many things, Covid has changed all that, hasn’t it? 

Danielle and I both had colds in the last couple of weeks. Mine came first, so it sounds like I passed it on to her. And that wasn’t nice of me, since I didn’t get too bad – short of energy and with a bunged-up nose (what the Spanish, among whom we live, call ‘constipado’, not at all to be confused with the English ‘constipated’). 

Poor Danielle, on the other hand, was truly laid low, with headaches, a sore throat, a terrible cough as well as all the ‘constipado’-ness. Why, she even ran a temperature and had to take to her bed, which was particularly unfortunate since we were visiting our grandkids at the time and it cut down the time she could spend with them.

As she was feeling just as bad after we got home, she decided she might be suffering from something a little less benign than a mere cold. We could hardly believe that it might be Covid, after having escaped infection throughout the height of the pandemic, and having had a further vaccination – our fourth – just at the end of November. But we took tests and, sadly, in both cases the result was the opposite of what we’d hoped for.

Yep. Our Covid tests had accentuated the positive. Which, far from eliminating the negative, let it in with all the force of a major irritation.

The bug: it’s negative when it’s positive

As so often when one receives bad news, my first reaction was denial. “It doesn’t matter, does it?” I thought. “I feel just fine”.

Old friends, not seen for years, were due to turn up from France the very next day. Surely they could come anyway? After all, feeling this well, how coud I possibly be transmitting a disease? 

But then saner thoughts (saner though negative) prevailed. It would be no act of friendship to renew our acquaintance by passing a Covid infection on to them. We wrote to warn them and they, sensibly, decided to postpone their visit. That’s despite having already checked in for their flight the next day.

Fortunately, they were able at little cost to rebook for January. If we can stay infection-free then, I’ll be happy to re-accentuate the positive after all. Which I suppose would be a celebration of the negative test status.

We’d arranged various things for our visitors. That all had to be undone. The lunch in our favourite local restaurant had to be cancelled, and the friends who were going to join us there put off. We had to pull out of the flamenco concert for which we’d booked four tickets, and find four friends who could take the tickets instead of us (fortunately not something that proved too difficult). And our exasperation was only deepened when the heavy rain that had been forecast for the time our visitors were due to be with us failed to materialise, and we had some glorious weather which would have made their visit all the more enjoyable.

Instead we sat around at home isolating ourselves or, at most, going for walks in the woods with our dogs, since social distancing there’s pretty easy: you can walk kilometres without getting within ten metres of anyone else.

And, of course, we kept testing ourselves. After all, I felt fine and Danielle was clearly on the mend too. The symptoms had been relatively slight, especially for me, and hadn’t lasted long. I reckon that’s down to the way the bug has evolved, making it less nasty these days, though I suspect having four vaccine shots helped too. 

Our recovery made it feel bizarre to have to behave as though quarantined when there seemed to be nothing the matter with us. But the grim two-line display that kept appearing on the test strip told us we just had to put up with our isolation.

Until finally it didn’t. We both got tests that showed us clear. We could return to normal life. Which was a relief, even though it deepened our frustration: we were infection-free once more, at a time when our friends would still have been with us, had they been able to stick to their planned visit.

Oh, well. At least we were negative at last.

Which meant we could be positive again.