Grrrrrrrrrrraaargh
Oct. 2nd, 2022 12:23 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
livNow I really do have Covid. Worst possible timing, because it's the middle of the High Holy Days and means I have to cancel leading services for Yom Kippur.
The thing is that I agreed to take a job leading the High Holy Days services for various small communities this year. I knew it was a risk, and I decided to do it because I have the skills and it was going to make a big difference to the communities who asked for help. So I did travelling and three unmasked services Sunday – Tuesday, and on Friday I tested positive. Meaning I'm letting down the community who were depending on me for Yom Kippur, and there's absolutely nobody who can pick up that big complicated service at three days' notice. I might or might not be able to lead over Zoom, but the community isn't really set up for hybrid, and honestly I'm not sure I'm going to be well enough.
I guess I'll never know, but I keep going back and forth over, was it inevitable that if I led on RH I'd get Covid and have to cancel YK? Could I have made it safer by insisting that the rest of the community wore masks, or even trying to lead masked myself? Should I have skipped the kiddush and communal meals, sticking to my usual principle of avoiding eating indoors? I didn't entirely feel able to insist because I was doing this job as a guest preacher, but maybe I should have done. Also realistically I didn't have a way to eat other than accepting hospitality. Or maybe the train journeys were just doomed, though I did wear a mask the entire time.
There's a plausible hypothesis that I got this not from my RH communities, but fromjack who possibly got it at an unmasked, indoor role-playing event. Which in some ways is more attractive, because it means that it's theoretically possible to do the visiting preacher thing without definitely getting Covid. But in some ways it's worse because, well, indoor all-day unmasked cons are beyond my risk threshold, but I live with someone who does consider that an acceptable trade-off, so maybe there's no point me being careful about such things. And to be fair jack has been doing indoor socializing for many months now, but it's only this week that the plague got us, so again, it's an increased risk but not a certainty.
Of course this may all be irrelevant because if the virus destroys my ability to do intellectual work I won't be in a position to decide whether I want to carry on travelling to lead services in future. But again, I'm telling myself that worrying about such things is useless. I had a pretty bad day yesterday, muscle aches and fever and generally feeling grim, today I'm still certainly ill but feel I'm on the mend and there doesn't seem to be much lung involvement (go vaccines!). I can certainly say that having Covid is far more uncomfortable than wearing a mask, though I know some people find masks more intolerable than I do, and some people suffer less badly with Covid than I have so far. And, well, I took off my mask earlier in the week, not because I was finding it annoying but so that other people could hear me and to be able to participate in activities that don't work well masked.
Clearly my precautions aren't good enough! But I don't know where to go from here; I could give up leading services, but most of my other risks aren't really optional (in-person work, living withjack). My only comfort is that I don't think I've infected anyone else, because I'm being pretty careful about testing before seeing people. If I was infected during Rosh HaShanah, and then got on a train, I think my mask is reasonably good source control and hopefully that was early enough that I wasn't hugely infectious yet. The only person I've spent time with since getting back was hatam_soferet. But wow, I'm grumpy.
The thing is that I agreed to take a job leading the High Holy Days services for various small communities this year. I knew it was a risk, and I decided to do it because I have the skills and it was going to make a big difference to the communities who asked for help. So I did travelling and three unmasked services Sunday – Tuesday, and on Friday I tested positive. Meaning I'm letting down the community who were depending on me for Yom Kippur, and there's absolutely nobody who can pick up that big complicated service at three days' notice. I might or might not be able to lead over Zoom, but the community isn't really set up for hybrid, and honestly I'm not sure I'm going to be well enough.
I guess I'll never know, but I keep going back and forth over, was it inevitable that if I led on RH I'd get Covid and have to cancel YK? Could I have made it safer by insisting that the rest of the community wore masks, or even trying to lead masked myself? Should I have skipped the kiddush and communal meals, sticking to my usual principle of avoiding eating indoors? I didn't entirely feel able to insist because I was doing this job as a guest preacher, but maybe I should have done. Also realistically I didn't have a way to eat other than accepting hospitality. Or maybe the train journeys were just doomed, though I did wear a mask the entire time.
There's a plausible hypothesis that I got this not from my RH communities, but from
jack who possibly got it at an unmasked, indoor role-playing event. Which in some ways is more attractive, because it means that it's theoretically possible to do the visiting preacher thing without definitely getting Covid. But in some ways it's worse because, well, indoor all-day unmasked cons are beyond my risk threshold, but I live with someone who does consider that an acceptable trade-off, so maybe there's no point me being careful about such things. And to be fair jack has been doing indoor socializing for many months now, but it's only this week that the plague got us, so again, it's an increased risk but not a certainty. Of course this may all be irrelevant because if the virus destroys my ability to do intellectual work I won't be in a position to decide whether I want to carry on travelling to lead services in future. But again, I'm telling myself that worrying about such things is useless. I had a pretty bad day yesterday, muscle aches and fever and generally feeling grim, today I'm still certainly ill but feel I'm on the mend and there doesn't seem to be much lung involvement (go vaccines!). I can certainly say that having Covid is far more uncomfortable than wearing a mask, though I know some people find masks more intolerable than I do, and some people suffer less badly with Covid than I have so far. And, well, I took off my mask earlier in the week, not because I was finding it annoying but so that other people could hear me and to be able to participate in activities that don't work well masked.
Clearly my precautions aren't good enough! But I don't know where to go from here; I could give up leading services, but most of my other risks aren't really optional (in-person work, living with
jack). My only comfort is that I don't think I've infected anyone else, because I'm being pretty careful about testing before seeing people. If I was infected during Rosh HaShanah, and then got on a train, I think my mask is reasonably good source control and hopefully that was early enough that I wasn't hugely infectious yet. The only person I've spent time with since getting back was hatam_soferet. But wow, I'm grumpy.
(no subject)
Date: 2022-10-03 08:44 pm (UTC)