Emerging

[liv]

So I tested positive for Covid for a full 14 days. By that point I had decided that I was likely not to be infectious any more and could ethically emerge from isolation, but fortunately I did get my second negative test anyway.

I missed Yom Kippur and most of Succot, which was really disappointing. But I didn't miss the glorious false summer as the nice weather seems to have lasted most of the month. And Friday evening I was safe to go and make Kiddush in hatam_soferet's succah, so I didn't completely miss out on the festival. I went to shul in person on Saturday, and we took lulav then (my community's custom is to include Shabbat). Then hatam_soferet took us punting and it was just perfectly idyllic, right at the end of summer with the autumn colours showing the postcard views at their best.

We returned to their house to drink tea, and while I was there jack texted me a photo: he had secretly built me a tiny succah! So I got to have my tea and breakfast in the succah for the very last day of the festival. And I was so so so touched that jack did the research and the actual engineering to build something for me. Of course it couldn't officially be kosher, being built by a non-Jewish person in the middle of Shabbat and after most of the festival, but it was still the loveliest present ever.

I had been given the honour of being one of the two symbolic brides for Simchat Torah, the person assigned to read the very last Torah portion. (The brides could also be grooms, they don't have to be both female, it just happened that in this case it was me and SG, one of the founder members of the community.) And I was nervous that Covid would rob me of that too, but the timing was just fortunate so I could do it. We had a lovely lovely in person service, with a decent number of kids including hatam_soferet's 4yo and my OSOs' 2yo. I decided to indulge myself in the first new-new dress I've bought in years, and my mother lent me a suitable Hat from her extensive collection, so I cut quite a figure. It was so lovely to have all three of my partners and my parents and my bff all present for my big day. And we did the Torah reading and the children's aliyah and the hakkafot (processing round the synagogue seven times) and our traditional frog dance and it was wonderful. Then we did it all again for the morning service because my community is a bit completionist like that. Since I had to take the day off work anyway, I returned home with ghoti_mhic_uait and had a bit of a chance to play with the children whom I hadn't seen since before the new year.

So although I lost most of my festival season to the horrid plague, the last couple of days couldn't have been more perfect. Immediately after that I went straight into teaching my first in-person course since I started my job exactly 3 years ago. This is partly because most of my role is about organizing production of online courses rather than face-to-face teaching, but also partly because the pandemic meant most of our f2f was cancelled until this summer. The course is really cool: it's designed to help people who work in healthcare or public health, and are currently approximately the only person in their organization who understands genomics, to train colleagues so that in future we can use modern sequencing methods to deal with infectious diseases. Not just Covid, which sort of kick-started the sequencing revolution, but other diseases too. So for example prescribing antibiotics based on sure knowledge they will work rather than trial and error until something shows up that the bugs aren't resistant to. Or quickly and definitively finding the source of an outbreak within a hospital. Or (and sorry guys, this is a bit apocalyptic) noticing when vaccine-derived polio strains mutate to become virulent and acting to prevent further spread.

The biggest challenge in some ways was finding the 'only genomics person in the organization' but we eventually managed to recruit two dozen such people from across the UK and Ireland. Which made for a really interesting bunch of students! Again, I'm really grateful that the timing of my Covid, although it made me miss Yom Kippur, didn't prevent me from leading this course. Also honestly if it hadn't been immediately after recovering from Covid I would have been quite nervous about it; I was indoors all day long for a week with over 30 mostly unmasked people who had travelled from all over the country, and I had to remove my mask to teach and sometimes to eat. We asked people to take LFTs before the start of the course, and at least once during the five day run. So I was only shut up in an enclosed space with people who had recent negative rapid tests, so that's at least something. One of the external instructors tested positive so she was able to teach her section on Zoom. One of my colleagues turned up on day 1 but had to go home sick, and another had rather nasty cold symptoms and turned up anyway, relying on the negative test. And one of the students had to leave the course early with a fever, so I'm not sure how much I should trust those "negatives".

I think it was a course that genuinely benefitted from being in person, for lots of reasons. But I also think we could, and should, have done more to mitigate risk, either leaving the windows open all the time or installing HEPA filters, and insisting on masking to the extent reasonable. I chose not to stay on campus or join the participants for dinner, so I didn't get the full experience of a full-time course.

Anyway, the teaching was very enjoyable but absolutely exhausting. I would certainly expect to be tired after a full long day of in-person teaching, but on this occasion I was actually shaky and nauseous by the time I got home, and could barely summon the energy to prepare and eat dinner before crashing out. I'm hoping this is just the aftermath of my Covid bout and doesn't indicate that I picked up another infection. But also, if this is as bad as it gets, if I have permanently lost the stamina to stand up in front of a class for most of a ten-hour day several days in a row, then I can work round that, it will make my life more awkward in some ways but it's not absolutely debilitating.

Today I skipped shul as I'm still feeling a bit tired and off-colour. Instead jack and I went for the most glorious walk in a little wood near Histon, and had brunch in the courtyard of a hipstery cafe we've been meaning to try for a while. And basically life is good, though I am not fully recovered physically.

Comments

[anais_pf]

Your exhaustion could be a temporary thing, and I hope it is. I had Covid for two weeks starting in mid-September, and only this past week do I feel as though I've regained my previous level of stamina and energy (which were not that high to begin with). I felt actively sick for two weeks, and really REALLY tired for another three weeks. Take it easy, you are still healing. I hope your previous level of stamina returns soon.

[liv]

I'm really sorry to hear you got Covid and were low on energy for weeks after. Thank you for the encouraging words. I don't have much reason to worry that this is permanent, I'm only one week from clearing the virus after all. But I'm just trying to think of contingencies.

[lethargic_man]

As a second data point, aviva_m also took two or three weeks to recover full strength after her second Covid infection, but did end up making a full recovery.

(Me, I was fully recovered by the time my second stripe disappeared, but have suffered permanent damage to my sense of smell, in that though it came generally back within a few days, both aviva_m and Rafi have been pointing out smells which I cannot perceive.)

[kass]

Oh I'm so glad Jack built you a sukkah! And also, glad you are Covid-negative. That damn virus messed with my Rosh Hashanah -- I was able to be back at shul for Yom Kippur, masked, but ugh. Pandemic is not fun.

[liv]

I was so worried on your account when you got sick at such a terrible time! I am really glad you made it back for YK; I feel so bad about letting my community down and I was just a visiting preacher there. But you're right, pandemic is not fun at all. The relative timing of the start of school terms and the HHDs is going to mean that there's a high chance of service leaders and other key people getting sick around Rosh HaShanah, every year until we decide to actually deal with this plague, and that's a depressing thought.

The succah was amazing! He learned that the minimum hight is only 10 tefachim, and he'd just got over feeling exhausted with the virus himself, so he went ahead and built it out of cut vines and tomato stakes. It was big enough for two of us to sit in but only just.

[pameladean]

There are so many good things in this entry, it is so nice to see. Also, what an absolutely wonderful dress that is. Also also, in re your remarks about additional COVID mitigations that were not undertaken, I continue utterly baffled that so few institutions get HEPA air cleaners. They are a bit of an expense for a household but should be less of one for an institution, and they are really easy to deal with. I just do not understand any of this.

P.

[rosefox]

I am SO GLAD you got to have some of your festival! It bucketed down rain here on Simchat Torah and I couldn't go to the giant community-wide hakafah out in the middle of Brooklyn, so it makes me really happy to hear about you being blessed with good weather when you needed it most.

Wishing you refuah shleimah!

[lilacsigil]

I'm glad you got to have some of the festival season at least!

[sfred]

I'm sorry you lost so much of festival season, and glad you got the last bit.

[ephemera]

I am glad that covid didn't entirely steal your festival season. (I am still dealing with some fatigue issues after my own run in with the horrid bug - hopefully they fade over time!)