Here We Go Again...

COVID has once again come to the Mastenbrook house. Uninvited. Unwanted. What a pain in the ass.

Intel in all its wisdom decided that everyone should come back to the office full time. As we live 5 minutes away from the campus where Brent works he's been easing back into it ahead of the September deadline. Well last week a lot of people came in. And of course one of them brought germs.

It's like the first week of school where your kids start catching every cold in the books except it's work and the cold is COVID. Which is a cold with a grudge.

He has a Teladoc appointment for this afternoon so hopefully he'll be able to get Paxlovid and start feeling better soon. Because it's been a bitch.

You would think that after having had it once, and being vaxxed multiple times it would just be a glancing blow by this point but nope.

Or maybe it is.

When I got it a couple of years ago I didn't take the Paxlovid because it wasn't bad. At first. It took awhile to settle in and become nasty. Which, again, I had been vaxxed so the assumption is that it would have been worse if I hadn't been. And as we know first hand what the worst is, I guess that's true. As miserable as Brent is right now, he's still better than the worst.

We as a whole learned very little from the full brunt of the pandemic. People still go out when they are sick. They still try to go into work when they don't feel well. (As Dana and I talked about earlier it's so fucked up that working while sick has become a virtue) People don't protect others from their germs.

A large part of Brent's staff is off right now and with the layoffs there are fewer and fewer of them anyway. If there was a good time to get sick, this wasn't it. So he's working through it. From home. Because as a manager he might need to keep the ship sailing, but as a responsible human he understands that infecting the crew doesn't really serve that end. But he really would rather be crashed on the couch sound asleep. That's how he spent a chunk of his fun holiday weekend.

He is most worried about the long tail of it. He and I both had a rough time recovering our lung capacity. Think months after the COVID was supposedly over before being able to do a full workout. And months still to get back to being able to go as far as fast in cardio. Hopefully that will be the part that is easier. A quicker and fuller recovery.

We're both hopeful that our luck holds and I don't get it. When he had it the first time I didn't. When I got it a year later he didn't. We are a two person show so it's really difficult when both of us are out of commission at the same time so it's just better if we take turns being sick. Fingers crossed it works out again.

So that's where we are right now. And even though it's September 2, he caught it in August. So it's still the reigning and undefeated champion of "Are you kidding me with this shit?" Oh, August, I want to love you again but you make it so difficult.