Long Cold

Feeling snotty

The first Covid fall, 2020, coincided with my older daughter’s first year in daycare. We spent most of that year in the endless line for Covid tests at a local hospital. Something like nine times, all negative. (When we ultimately all got it there were rapid tests.)

To say this is not to reveal anything all that specific because the criteria for needing one included such ubiquitous 2-year-old symptoms as has runny nose, which, whom amongst us. And then you’d pass people you knew in, and en route to/from, this line, because these noses have a tendency to run.

Fall 2021 is more of a blur. I’d just had another baby and that was a bit preoccupying, but I think there were also trips to the testing center. Maybe not as many? I remember doing an outdoor December birthday party. I also remember that shortly after this, even outdoor gatherings were once again illegal.

Which brings us to fall 2022, which is best summed up in the form of a hacking cough that switches to gagging, and if you think I’m sharing something personal about my children’s health rest assured I am speaking about myself. Not currently, but I don’t expect this respite to last.

On and off for the past couple months it has been going on, such that I’ve lost track of which one’s which. Three weeks of something I had thought might have been Covid but that presumably wasn’t because — thanks a lot, four vaccines — the next one was. RSV was going around so presumably that, or multiple colds. Then another cold after the Covid, but sort of compounding it, extending it, bringing back the night coughing fits that had finally stopped.

Why mention any of this? Who cares about my congestion, even if it is impressive (it is impressive)?

I share this not because it makes me unique, but rather because it’s a largely undiscussed yet ubiquitous state of affairs. Novelist Lydia Kiesling has a good essay about it, in the context of the American system. Is it different in Canada? It is and it isn’t. Yes, you can take your kid (or yourself) to the doctor without a copay. But daycare is still (except in Quebec, and in Ontario things may be improving) wildly expensive and facing all kinds of challenges.

And the socialist utopia where the minute your throat feels a bit funny you’re off to one of those rest-cure places like in The Magic Mountain or on Poirot? That is not this. Toronto has a culture of work-through-it, or maybe I just do because (as has been pointed out to me) I’m American. My work can go on even if I get the two red lines.

The part of this I topic I find most compelling is also the trickiest to talk about. What are you supposed to, you know, do? What are other people doing, and how does it square with what they say they’re doing?

I got accustommed to this world where anyone symptomatic in a household meant, time to treat everyone as biohazard and not go outside. That was my introduction to having a child in daycare. For me there was no before on that front. It was weird and terrible and yes once I did a (successful!) job interview from one of those Covid testing lines, but it was what I knew. Every day you had to attest that your child wasn’t ill, that your child hadn’t been (unbeknownst to you) travelling outside Canada, etc., or no daycare. This was how it was.

And now? I have no idea. There are emails with current rules, but they no longer appear to mean much of anything. A child with a fever or who’s throwing up stays home for a while, like in olden times. But gone is the expectation that everyone will treat colds like Covid or even know if they have it. People are no longer isolating for maybe-Covid but are also cagey about who has what. It’s still understood as taboo to go outside with a cough, whatever the source, but also society has for better or worse (and I see both sides!) deemed it unsustainable to respond to every sniffle with a two-week isolation period.

And when I actually had it (despite a return to indoor masking, despite four of the shots), what was I even supposed to do? Sleep in our unfinished basement? Place my fortunately not infected family members into a bunker?

Ah, but at least it means whichever cold came after was just a cold and not a Covid. Or was it? Variants! Maybe even when I’ve tested negative it’s been Covid. Maybe it’s unethical that I’ve ever left the house, and I say this having hardly left the house.

But also: I don’t remember not feeling at least a little bit sick. The exhaustion compounds. Enough things, whatever they look like under a microscope, that cause you to be up for an hour in the night, coughing to the sound of “As Time Goes By” on headphones, waiting for the lozenge to be done so maybe you fall back asleep, it adds up.

Sephora wanted me to “get excited.” Per their email. This was because the eyeliner I ordered was on its way. Ordered, that is, as a post-pink-eye replacement.