A Brush with Covid

September has not started brilliantly.

We had our friends, David and Lorna, pop round for lunch on 1st September as they were delivering some lovely terracotta tiles that we are going to use for one of our terraces. Lunch was lovely, the weather was fine and all was set for a great month. However, almost as soon as David and Lorna took their leave, I had a ferocious tickle in my throat that would not go away. It was as if an insect had been inhaled and was not yet dead, and it brought about paroxysms of coughing that lasted the rest of the day and well in to the evening.

I felt fine, but could not get rid of this tickle and woke up on my birthday (2nd September) with the persistent cough. I felt sure that it was completely unrelated to Covid-19 as I had no other symptoms, and put it down to an allergic reaction to something in the garden. I do tend to suffer, every now and again, from sneezing fits; some sort of hay-fever type thing. This was horrible, though, and even our neighbour, Mari-Petra, got concerned as she heard this relentless hacking from the house.

As a result of an endless round of throat-tickles and coughing, my birthday was hardly an auspicious occasion. I didn’t feel like doing a thing, so could not enter into the enthusiastic planning that Andrew loves to pursue whenever there is a birthday in the house. Poor Andrew did his best to try to keep me from sinking into a decline, but it was an uphill battle.

To be on the safe side, I thought it best to get tested and had a video consultation with a GP on Friday evening. Although we could benefit from public health care here in Spain, as we are both self-employed and make monthly social security payments, we have remained with our private health insurance provider, Sanitas, for no other reason than it seems to be good value and we don’t wish to add any unnecessary burden onto any state-run healthcare system. That said, we will join the public system as soon as we can.

I explained my symptoms to the GP over the internet and she agreed that it didn’t sound like Covid-19 and that an allergic reaction was more likely. To get a Covid-19 test here in Spain, you need to have a prescription, and this is why I had to have a chat with a GP before anything else could be arranged. It was decided that, given my age, a test would be advisable.

I received the prescription for a PCR test but you need to wait 5 days from the first manifestation of symptoms before going for the test. Sanitas sent a list of the laboratories offering tests, and for the centre in Granada there is no need to make an appointment. I simply turned up during clinic times and was seen almost immediately. I did worry slightly that there was no separate area for Covid testing; this is a laboratory/clinic for every kind of test, and the waiting room had a fair number of patients waiting to be seen. However, masks were obligatory and the turnover of patients is so fast that you barely have time to bump into anyone else.

The test is not covered by our health insurance (there’s a surprise!) and it cost €130. €130!! for the fastest of throat swabs and in and out in less than 5 minutes. But what price can we put on our health? Results would be emailed in 24 hours.

I don’t know what testing procedures are like under the public healthcare system, but this seemed pretty efficient to us, and was the only way to make sure that I wasn’t, at that time, carrying the virus.

Sure enough, the next day the results of the test came through and they were negative.

As I said, I was almost 100% sure that the symptoms I had were not consistent with Covid, so I hadn’t got myself worked up into a frenzy of worry, but it was still good to know. By this time, the tickle cough had subsided but I was still sneezing like there was no tomorrow.

Having run through a whole range of possible causes, whatever I have decided to simply turn into a cold yesterday, with runny nose, sneezing and just a heady feeling of bleurgh. I am not a good cold patient, and they never leave me in a hurry, so I have just resigned myself to a few days surrounded by tissues. All I can say is that it is a good job that we don’t have any guests booked in as they would all have fled in horror had they arrived to hear my cough.

While all this was going on it was, as I mentioned, my birthday. It was also our second wedding anniversary on 8th September. This was the date of our wedding celebration, attended by our families and friends. We actually got officially married in Gibraltar on 29th August 2018, with our fabulous friends Nick and Richard as our witnesses. That was such a wonderful time and it seems a very long time ago. Even the storms on our wedding day did little to dampen the joyousness of the occasion. If you had asked me on my 50th birthday if I ever imagined a time when I would be getting married to Andrew, I would have dismissed such a question out of hand. For a start, I am not sure I had yet met Andrew when I turned 50! I spent that particular birthday in a very bad way, mentally, and it’s probably best not to dwell on that period too much.

However, here we are 8 years on, living in Spain in the most beautiful village in our gorgeous home. I don’t have Covid-19, I just have a sniffling head cold. We don’t have any guests, but what can we do about it for now? We watch with despair the shambolic ongoing situation in the UK and always wish that the family was over here with us. We get saddened when circumstances conspire to prevent any trips to the UK, particularly as we rapidly approach the day when we will become grandparents for the first time. We had hoped that we might be able to go and spend Christmas and New Year with the children, but new measures now look set to prevent that visit too. Perhaps we can look forward to a great season of skiing, but who knows how that might pan out?

Andrew’s in the studio, working, with Alfie beneath his desk. I am in the kitchen preparing some food for a tapas evening here this evening with friends, and we both spend an inordinate amount of time trying our best to block out the restrictions that we are currently having to live with. But all that aside, Happy Birthday to me, Happy Anniversary to my fabulous husband and here’s to many, many more. Right, I’m off to blow my nose…

Gibraltar August 2018