At work yesterday the surgeon was kind enough to share with us something he’d picked up on a business trip to Malaysia: a virus.
He spent the whole list coughing and spluttering and sneezing snot into his mask. Masks do a reasonable job of containing germs as we all know from Covid times, but there’s only so much it can do against highly explosive sneezes. In that situation, the viral particles fly out the sides to spray unsuspecting passers bye, or in this case, coworkers.
I can understand why he came to work. From his point of view, he was feeling better than he had been, and our patients would have all had to be cancelled if he didn’t come in. I’m sure they were all safe from infection. I’m more annoyed at myself, that I didn’t take more care. I wasn’t as scrupulous with the mask wearing and hand washing as I should have been. So, now it’s a waiting game. Much like the famous hypothetical cat, I am now both sick and well. As in, I feel perfectly fine, but the viral particles might be busy reproducing inside me as I write, and it may only be a matter of time before the symptoms start to appear, buggering up all my immediate future plans. Or not. I might be lucky and have avoided getting infected, and I’ll just push on with my life and probably forget all about my present worries when they get replaced by whatever concerns are round the corner for me. So, what’s it going to be?
…..
The next day
As I monitor myself for any early signs of viraemia, which would cause a week or so of mild inconvenience, I’m reminded of the experience of my cousin several decades ago in London. In the early nineties he was working as a junior doctor on an HIV ward when he got an accidental needle stick injury. In those days AIDS was a death sentence and with terrible stigma attached, so the months that he had to wait to see if he seroconverted must have been horribly stressful. It does put my present situation somewhat into perspective.