laratheescapeartist

Covid finally got us, two and a half years into this bloody pandemic.

2 days after returning from England for our summer holiday I started feeling more tired than usual (hard to judge when you have two small children and feel constantly tired anyway) and had a slight sore throat. I’m not sure whether I picked it up on the overnight ferry we took home from Hull-Rotterdam which was very crowed, or if I picked it up earlier from some friends – although none of them think they had it, so who knows. We relaxed a bit more than usual about Covid precautions while we were holiday and were more social than we have been for the past 2 and a half years (we had three meals indoors with different friends in the space of a week whereas our social life in Belgium is mainly conducted at outdoor playgrounds) so it was inevitable that it would happen.

It’s impossible to be ill while you have kids, all I wanted to do was lie still and watch terrible shows on Netflix all day and eat cornflakes and toast for every meal but none of that is doable when you need to entertain a 3-year-old and a 7-year-old and feed them vaguely nutritional meals 3 times a day +snacks.

The only silver lining was the timing was about as good as it could be for us, we’d made it home and so at least could be ill in our own house and luckily everyone was better and the quarantine period finished by the time school started 2 weeks later.

It took a few weeks before the 3-year-old had her usual energy levels, and I still feel like my heart rate increases more than it used to for the same amount of exercise but otherwise we’re OK. I regret letting our guard down over the summer and getting lulled into a false sense of security with the warm weather. Who knows how many times we can catch Covid before it does lasting damage if it hasn’t already. It feels massively depressing to be going into another autumn and winter period making the same kind of social calculations as last year…

…all the while knowing that at school and my husband’s office there are zero precautions and so even if we have no social life beyond playgrounds, we are still likely to catch it again and have another two weeks of our lives written off and a more chance of suffering from Long Covid.

Is the calculation by those in power that kids these days have no future anyway due to climate change, so the fact that practically all of them having had multiple covid infections by the time they are in their twenties will have serious Long Covid health problems just not an issue?