COVID Hits Home

 Despite all my efforts and all my positive thinking and all Evie's mask wearing.... Evie tested positive for COVID Tuesday night.  I have felt all kinds of emotions about that, the biggest one being guilt that I put her in a situation where her health was at risk.  I feel like I had an impossible choice of sacrificing her health or sacrificing her education....  There was no good option because our governor declared that schools could no use virtual synchronous learning to count towards the 180 days of education.  So I hold Governor Bill Lee personally responsible for my kid getting COVID, because he took away the option that worked for our family and for many other families.  I am so disgusted with politics being dragged into this public health issue...

But anyway, Evie is doing well.  Actually I would say she has done better with COVID than she did with the flu when she got it 2 years ago.  That's not to say that COVID is no big deal - we are fortunate that she seems to have had a mild case, and she still did not feel well and is now having to miss 8 days of school.  I am frustrated because we are supposedly the first case at school, but I can tell you that Evie has not been anywhere other than school in the last week.  We had not started dance classes, she had not been to church...  She did go with me to Walgreens last Saturday, but we wore our masks and were there for 15 minutes, socially distanced.  So unless she happened to catch it there, which seems highly unlikely, she has to have gotten it from school where she eats at the same time with 8 other children and less than 6 feet of space between them, plus sits in a classroom with more than 20 other kids.

She did not have any fever until Tuesday evening.  She had said Tuesday morning that she had woken up at 4 am and couldn't get back to sleep so we let her get a few more minutes of sleep and be late to school.  She did not have a fever.  Granadaddy picked her up, as usual, and she played on the playground and then they came home.  In the course of those 2 hours between school and when Seth and I came over, she started feeling bad and by the time we got there, she had a fever of 100.8.  So I brought her home and gave her a rapid antigen test and it immediately turned positive.  I emailed the principal and her teacher and the next morning, the coordinator who handles these things for the school called and took a report.  In order to be able to go back to school, Evie has to be out for 2 weeks and has to have a negative test.  So there's that.

All this time of being very strict, of wearing masks properly, of not doing things we'd love to get to do because we didn't want to expose Evie to COVID, and she couldn't even get to go to school for 2 weeks without getting it....

I guess the good news is she'll have natural immunity for a bit and maybe by the time we would be worried about it again the vaccine for her age group will be out.  

I am so disappointed in our country's handling of this pandemic.  I would gladly have keep Evie doing virtual synchronous learning until a vaccine was out for her group.  I get that it didn't work for a lot of people.  For it DID work for many, and I am livid that that option was taken away so that Bill Lee could score points with his voters.  Absolutely disgusting.

Like I said, though, Evie is doing well.  I gave her ibuprofen around the clock from Tuesday night until Friday morning.  Her temp was normal when it was time for her dose Friday morning, so we decided to see what happened.  Her temp was normal again this morning.  Her symptoms have just been fever, sore throat, sneezing, and a very stuffy nose, or, as she says, "My nose is stuffed."

She said yesterday, "I'm glad if I had to get COVID, it was in this family."  I said, "What do you mean by that?"  She said, "Because nobody could take better care of me than you, Mama."  (Cue weeping).  I am so glad she feels that way.  I feel like I let her down.