Plague diary: day 31 (really, 31?)

Now that the pneumonia is gone, one day seems to be much like another. I did push it a bit too hard on Tuesday, and needed a long rest. The rest of this week has been more or less the same. I'm ok as long as I'm not doing something. But once I do I just get winded and lose all my energy. I can hang up laundry just fine. Then 3 minutes later I realise, no, it wasn't fine. I can't figure out my limits because the goal posts keep changing all the time for no obvious reason.

A couple of the doctors I've spoke to have said that they're finding The Virus can linger as long as 6 weeks. I'm only just past week 4, so I'm not surprised it's still having an impact. I am worrying that this is what life is like now. Perhaps the lung damage is permanent and I'll just have no energy to speak of from here on out. I mean, with chicken pox, I've gotten scarred for life in a number of places on my skin, so it'd not be shocking that covid-19 might do some irreparable harm. No one knows. It's all new to everyone. Like those Samsung phones with exploding batteries. They were just phones. They're expected to just either work, or to break. Nobody expected them to blow up. Perhaps The Virus just smashes things up before it leaves like a renter who lost their deposit.

In other news, the son is getting consonants. M and D and H, mostly. He says Da like his sister did, but not as often, and with more variety of other things. I suppose by the time we next leave the house he'll be walking and speaking at least a few small words. He's eating too. Anything we put in front of him. Blueberries, cucumbers, avocado, tomatoes, squash, asparagus, mushrooms, lemons, brussels sprouts. Anything. This is so very different from what we got used to with his sister, who in retrospect, was a picky eater. I always thought she was just the sort to just eat a bit, and was ok with only eating a bit. Now I know, she was really thinking Ok, I'll eat this one thing, but the rest, I'll just move around and hope they never try it again. I like milk. Can I just stick to milk?.

Of course I'm not doing the food prep. I'm sure I would have passed on The Virus by now if they didn't have it already, but I'm still a little wary, since no one really knows how this things can spread. I'll feed him, but with chopsticks so I stay far away from touching the food or touching him myself. It's odd, and awkward and unpleasant. He has changed quite a bit in the last month, and it bugs me to be missing it from so up close.

I've spent a huge amount more time with R than I did while we both had school and work. I'm still sleeping in her room, but I don't really count that as quality time together. I've stopped reading her bedtime stories. I've run out of books from our queue and have struggled to find age appropriate stuff. I read Neverwhere on a few good breathing days in there, but that and the short story sequel are done. I need to get back in to the habit of reading before it's broken entirely.

Also, R is now pretty big. She's still smaller than us, but she's not a little girl. She's a small person, but a proper person. Still very headstrong. We are still facing many challenges. I'm trying to get a bit of learning in there, but all she wants to do is use the iPad or sometimes play with toys (which I'm happy to join on, when I have the energy for it, but her room is so cramped with the extra bed, we can't both use the spaceport at the same time). I've been trying to teach her useful stuff based on things that come up in conversation. Monday I explained how FM and AM radio (frequency vs amplitude modulation) works. Today I explained triangulation (how do we know where a lion is when it roars). On a practical level, to get her away from the iPad, I hid it today, and taught her card games. Poker and solitaire. She seems to like them both and the latter I'm finding less boring. This seemed to get her happily away from technology for the whole day.

Plague Diary: day 23 - I leave the house

For the first time in over 3 weeks, I left the house. It was interesting to finally see what the local area was like in lockdown. But more interesting was going to the local Covid-19 hub for additional testing to find out why I so breathless today.

Today was weird. I had lung capacity, at least as I measured with the flow meter. But just having a conversation was leaving my breathless. By mid afternoon I called the GP. they made the appointment at the Covid-19 hub at a nearby hospital to check out my bloody oxygen levels – that's apparently the important number, more important than how much air you're getting in. Since I couldn't walk or drive, they sent an ambulance to pick me up and take me there. With the understanding that if anything was awry, they'd take me on to hospital.

So I charge my phone and collect all my meds to take with me, get my shoes on and wait. All the while my brain is telling me that if things do go wrong this will be the last time I see my family, since no one can come with me or see me in hospital. I try to not think of it, but do make sure I say goodbye before I go.

When the ambulance comes, they want to take my readings in the house before they take me away. Bloody pressing, temperature, that sort of thing. Then they give me a mask and off I go.

It's like a weekend out there. Lots of things are closed, but there are plenty of people out and about. The biggest sign that things are different were the well-spaced queues outside the post office and grocery stores. I saw a dozen or so people wearing face masks, but most people were not. Signs outside the park warning people to keep distant. And many "We're closed" signs on shops.

Once at the Hub I was asked to wait outside for the doctor to collect me. I waited at first in the ambulance, but it was a nice day, so I waited outside the front door with the paramedic from the ambulance a coupe of meters away. The wait was pretty short.

The doctor was wearing a mask and plastic sheet of his clothes, just like the ambulance people. Plus he had goggles over his glasses. He took my vitals and blood oxygen levels, and everything looked good. My chest also sounded clear. He thinks it's the lung lining being irritated from all the horrors it's seeing (not his words) and that it'll be like this possible for a few more weeks. This virus is slow to get over. and even afterward, my lungs will still be tight for a while. So unless my energy levels drop drastically, it looks like I'll be ok to ride this out.

I guess it's closer to the 45 days some of the early reports from Asia were saying instead of the 7 days we're being told in the UK. Which makes me (sigh) potentially at the halfway point.

Plague Diary: Day 21 - why can't this end?

This virus seems to be completely unable to make up its mind whether its coming or going. Every day starts with a normal temperature going into a fever. The "getting better" feeling I had at the end of last week has switched back to the same heavy-lunged drowseyness I was feeling in the first few days. The GP's given me antibiotics in case what I'm feeling is bacterial pneumonia. We should see shortly if this makes a difference or not.

L is spending all her energy keeping the house together – which I greatly appreciate given I have to nap for an hour if I try to hang up laundry. I think she's going a bit mad with all the work, plus looking after a crawling baby. And R is going a bit mad with all the freedom from schooling.

I found R had replaced her chore calendar with chores or her own making, like "Binge watch something" or "stay home" rather than the previous "take out compost" or "tidy room". I give her points for creativity. But zero for making family life easier.

Plague Diary: Day 14

I've been feeling better over the past few days. I woke this morning with only a 37.2^C temperature. So I decided to try working from home today. I was fine until around 1230, when my lungs let me know it was a mistake.

I've pretty much reverted a week from just a few hours of work. Not sure how or why, but I certainly won't be fooled like that again.I don't know what about work hit me so hard – perhaps it's my authoritative voice? Perhaps it was listening and paying attention and making notes? I don't know, but it's not something my body can cope with.

I am not impressed with this virus

In other news, we've been doing more video calls lately. R, like most children always acts up on the calls. So we tried something different – turning off our side of the video. It worked as expected, at first. She didn't act up or make faces at all. Until after a while she burst into tears about not being able to see herself. That was a surprising side effect. but I will continue trying to just not show our side of the video and see if there's a way to make calls to family more enjoyable that way.

Plague Diary: day 8

Day 8 and the whole country is on lockdown. On the other hand we finally got our food order delivered. So we are no longer scraping the bottom of the barrel in terms of what we can eat. That said, there was no pasta, so I don't know how R is going to cope.

We had two grocery orders. One, from Tesco that we booked ten days ago. The other from the local veg shop that we called in yesterday. Given the reliability of the latter, I wish we could get everything from them. But it's good to know we won't run out of fresh food.

Today R had her first Zoom conference call with the other kids in her class. Good thing I use this at work all the time. It was easy to install and show her how to use it. Then I just let her be for 90 minutes. It seemed quite chaotic and I did not have the energy to even watch.

On that note, I'm still tired very easily. Talking a lot, especially on the phone, really does me in. I had a couple of long calls today after which I just had to nap. I say I'm easily exhausted, but not at night when I try to sleep. Then I'm just laying in bed for ages. (Last night wasn't helped by R setting an alarm for 7am, which only I heard. So I had to hunt down where her iPad was so I could kill it.

Talked to the GP yesterday about my symptoms and Covid-19. She said it does sounds like I've got it – which does bring some peace of mind. She also says that since it's been a week I should start to feel better soon. Most people are over it after a week, she says, except some take a turn for the worse around day 8 or 9. Which implies that if things are still ok Thursday, I should be past the worst of it. Apparently the lung/cough issues should linger for ages – but that doesn't really give me an idea of when I'm no longer contagious. Nor does it give me a sense of when I'd be ready to work again, but I should be able to work that out for myself.

Plague diary

Day 6 of what appears to be covid-19. It's hard to tell since most of the symptoms are so generic and there is nearly zero testing in the UK. All I know for sure is that I've got a fever, some mild chest and throat symptoms and am exhausted all the time. The girl has a higher fever and is bouncing off the walls trying to find something to do. L and the baby are both fever and symptom free.

I was coping with working form home for 2 weeks before coming down with anything. I decided to self-isolate when someone on the floor above me at work tested positive. Most of my coworkers decided the same thing. I have to say that our conference calls became much more chatty once they became nearly the sole human interaction we could experience.

I'm still not sure how I caught this. Could be anywhere. Looking back at the 5-14 days before I felt anything, I'd not gone out much, but since I've been on pills that make me immunocompromised, it appears it doesn't take much. And when it hit, it came on pretty fast. I started feeling a sore throat at around 5-6am. By 11am I was completely wiped out and dropped off the conference call, saying I'd be out for a while. Hung up and and went to sleep.

The next day R came down with a fever, so I've been sleeping on an inflatable mattress in her room. Which is much better than the tiny sofa in the office I had been using. Since then, everything has shut, including schools. We're slowing running out of food, so I hope out grocery delivery does not get cancelled (like our last one was). Beyond that we're catching up on a lot of old Deep Space Nine

(With R's newfound interest in all things Trek, we've already watched all of Next Generation, plus 2 of the movies and a little Picard)

Unfortunately I don't have an extra energy to do useful things like clean the place, or file away the mess of papers which have accrued. The one night I stayed up late dealing with bills completely wiped me out, and I won't be doing that again.

To keep R in the right mood, on Friday I read her The Masque of the Red Death as a bedtime story. She absolutely loved the description of the Black Room – It sounds so beautiful. And she said that maybe this could happen to the Tories, which means she understood what the story was about.

Annoyingly the pleasure of when I get better will be diminished by the fact I've no idea if I've actually got covid-19 or am just sick. So when we all feel fine again we'll still be stuck here uselessly quarantined until 2021, at this rate. I've already written my MP get universal testing, I suggest you write yours too.

The birth story: Part 2

Binge watching TV is something we don't do much anymore. Before having kids, we'd sometimes burn through 4 or 5 episodes of a boxed set between dinner and bed. These days, if it's kid friendly we can do one a day, but anything more mature is more like once or twice a month. So when we sat down to watch Firefly by ourselves, it was just relaxing to just sit and vegetate.

At quarter to 10 at night, while watching Episode 8, L's waters broke. We'd had a few false alarms on the water breaking so far (it was August and a bit hot. Sweatiness can be confusing). This time we were sure. No doubt about it. This baby was on the way.

We had to get ready. We paused the show while we cleaned floor and took stock. It could be fast or slow. I went to prepare the bed, and get the battery and electrodes for the TENS machine.

At this point the weight of it all finally hit me. After years of trying all the false starts had taken their toll and I was emotionally drained. And up until this point the whole thing felt more virtual than real. Like the whole pregnancy was happening in a mirror and I was only just watching through the hard glass. I'd met all the ups and downs so far with a detached Oh, that's interesting. But that was over and it was now time to be present. So I burst into tears and had a good long cry.

With the house ready and my head finally in the right place I went back to join L on the sofa to watch the rest of the show.

A couple of episodes later, around midnight the sharp pains in L's lower abdomen started. L calls the midwife to let her know and they both agree it's probably not contractions. Human abdomens contain lots of things that can cause pain, not just birthy-things. I make a coffee just in case, because this night will need focus.

Coffee is not really working, because I keep dozing off during episode 12. The pains don't turn into contractions – things are not going the same as last time. We’re in somewhat new territory here.

Around 2:30, something more like contractions start. L starts, then soon gives up trying to monitor the contractions with her watch. It's pretty simple. Could we write an app to do it?
Yes… but now isn't a good time. Let's just download one. I’m sure we can find something.

The app turns out to work pretty well. I recommend it for anyone who is pedantic about exact numbers and labour. full disclosure – we didn't use it for very long, so YMMV.

Many somethings it turns out. A nicely rated app called Contraction timer won the random draw. After ten minutes of monitoring we were definitely in Zone. At 2:59, L calls the midwife and catches her up to the situation.

Are you sure you want us there?

We look at the app

We've had 5 contractions in 20 mins. Yes.

We'll be there in about an hour

When R was born we watched the birth episode of the V remake. It seems to be a trend, as much as two data points can be.

So back to the videos we go while we wait. We watch episode 13 – the birth episode – all the while tracking the contractions.

At 4:20, ten minutes shy of the end of the last episode the midwives arrive. I hit pause, turn off the display and get the door. There's two midwives, the one we’ve been seeing (yeah, continuity) and a midwife we've not met before. They immediately get to business and bring the bags in.

For the past week L has been baking biscuits. Ostensibly it was to make sure the midwives would have something to eat. But I’m pretty sure it was mostly to divert the nesting instinct into something practical.

I started the kettle for some tea, and got out the biscuits. I'd even bought some milk so there was something to put in the tea (we don’t use milk for anything, but I thought it important to keep these people happy and attentive and thinking good things about us). They had some of the tea and biscuits, but I don't think they actually finished any.

They got on with explaining what they were doing and telling us to get in the right mood. Plus paperwork. I remember papers and piles of things on the table. Oh, and being told We've not got a record of telling you about all these risks, let's list them all now. As if we could possibly change our minds now.

The midwives spent most of their time whispering to each other. I know it’s meant to stay out of our way, and keep us in control. But half the time it felt like What are we doing wrong that they judging us about? and the other half felt like it was the soundtrack for a spooky film.

At about quarter til 5 we decide we’re on the home stretch. They checked the cervix and it was only a little dilated – 4cm, I think. Not enough to say "This is it!" but enough to know things are on their way. At this point we bothering with the contraction timer and start trying for mood music. I get out the laptop which has the labour playlist we created for R, but never used. iTunes failed. It crashed over and over. Never got through a single song. Technology failed us.

At to keep the trend going, at this point the TENS machine gives out. I hunt for replacement batteries which surprisingly were in the place I remembered putting them, just in case. Thank you, younger me.

At around sunrise L is no longer comfortable on the sofa so we head to the bedroom. It feels like it's time, but the cervix is not dilated enough, so clearly we’ve some ways to go. How much can I dilate in a single contraction? Dunno. I Can't see why you can't do a cm per contraction. So 4 contractions and we'll be ready.

L got on all fours on the bed. A few feet away from the waterproof sheet I'd put on the bed earlier (we’d only bought the mattress a few months ago). But, damnit, I was not going even suggest moving.

This is when the painful contractions start and L really felt the need to push. After 4 contractions the baby was crowning. It took two more before he came out.

And there he was.

A few moments later, he cried. The first few breaths were all gurgley with the sounds of the remaining amniotic fluid. Each cry has less and less gurgle until the fourth cry was clear.

Unlike R who was blue at first, he was red. And he looked so different from her when she was born. He was huge, a full kilo heavier than R, and it showed in the chubby limbs.

In a slightly organised chaotic way, L rolled onto her back, lay down and held the baby on her chest. He immediately started feeding. The midwife rubbed his skin to help moisturise it with the vernix. I lay in the bed (on top of the unused waterproof part) next to L, both of us happy and holding our newborn son. The birth had been perfect.

It stayed that way for about an hour.

To be continued