COVID Strikes

 A few weeks ago, we all got sick with COVID.  Omicron has showed up in Uzbekistan as it has pretty much everywhere else in the world.  It seems like everyone who hasn't yet gotten sick has fallen ill to the omicron variant of COVID.  Brandon and I both have family members who have gotten sick, in addition to friends here in Tashkent and back in the US.  

When Kathleen was the first to get sick with a cold, neither Brandon nor I thought much about it.  When Sophia, Eleanor, and Joseph got sick in quick succession, I still didn't think that it was anything other than a cold.  Only Sophia had a fever, and it only lasted for half a day.  But by the time William, Elizabeth, I, and finally Brandon also got sick, we thought that maybe Brandon should get tested.  It's not very often that every single person in the family gets sick within a week.  Usually at least a few people get lucky and miss out on the fun.

I confess that I was a little disappointed when Brandon's test came back negative.  If we were all going to be sick, it would be nice to have COVID done with.  But then the medical unit asked him to come back in for a PCR test, as they are more sensitive than the rapid test he had taken.  So back in to the embassy he went for another nose swab, and this time it came back positive.

By this point, everyone in the family had gotten sick, and some of them were already feeling mostly better.  I was relieved to not have to decide whether or not to isolate and by the time we figured out that Brandon was sick, half of us were already past the isolation stage anyway.  

The kids were all a little excited about finally haven fallen ill to the dreaded COVID and survived unscathed.  I was relieved to have gotten it over with with no problems at all.  Brandon and I both felt a little crummy for half a day and had congestion and some coughing for awhile, but we've definitely had worse colds.  I'm also grateful that we had the omicron variant and not the delta variant from last year, which seems to have been much worse to go through.

So now we can join the hundreds of millions of people across the world that have fallen ill to COVID, although I can't say that we have a particularly interesting story about it.  We got sick, everyone got better, and then we moved on with our lives.  My favorite part of the story is that we don't have to worry about testing positive before we take any trips.  The children were very disappointed to hear that it didn't mean that we don't have to take any more tests, but at least the outcome of the tests won't be so stressful anymore.  There's always a silver lining!