I SPENT the last week isolating at home, watching as the world went mad. Not that anything is wasted if you make it a learning experience, and what I learned over the week was that I'd better never commit a crime as I sure as hell wouldn't be able to do the time.
I was teetering on the edge by the time I finally tested negative last Monday. So badly did I cope with my confinement that I stupidly decided I'd do a bit of gardening to break the monotony.
It was nice weather, and a bit of fresh air surely couldn't hurt. What I didn't factor in was that the virus wasn't yet done with me.
I know Boris Johnson informed us Omicron was a mild variant; well, if that's true, I'm glad I never met Delta.
I'm lucky in so far as my symptoms could have been much worse. In my case there were no headaches, fever or nausea; instead, the virus focused on my weakness, my lungs.
I find it impressive that a virus so small it can only be seen under a microscope, knew not only where my vulnerability lay, but targeted it.
My wife bought an oxygen monitor, a small technological wonder which attaches to your finger like a clothes peg and measures your blood oxygenation.
For a normal fit person, the figure should be around 95-99; mine fluctuated around 94 but thankfully it came back up, so I was spared a trip to the hospital.
Not only was I isolated at home, but I was also isolated within my home. My daughter was only over Covid a couple of weeks before I tested positive, with my son following a few days after me.
Amid this plague house, my wife seemed impervious to the virus, proving the findings of that world-renowned virologist, Edwin Poots, who declared Catholics are six times more likely to contract the virus than Protestants.
Like homes across the country, our kitchen resembled a laboratory as, every morning, we lined up to do lateral flow tests. I'm embarrassed to admit I was the worst with them, much to my family's amusement.
With the gag reflex of a child, as soon as the probe touched my throat, I let out sounds normally confined to farms.
The fact that my first experience doing a lateral flow test was deeply traumatic didn't help. It wasn't long after they had become available, and I'd gone to bed feeling a bit 'off'.
As with most men, I spent most of the night tossing and turning, emitting just enough noise to ensure my wife was aware of my discomfort. Well, I hate to suffer alone.
Having endured hours of my childishness she finally cracked, marching me into the bathroom to do a lateral flow. Still unsure if I was being my normal hypochondriacal self or if there was a chance of a Covid infection, she remained at the bathroom door, barking instructions.
"Hurry up, shove it up your nose. No, right up, higher, higher". I complained I was afraid it was about to come out of one of my ears when she finally relented saying, "Right, now use it to scrape at the back of your throat".
I froze, staring at the probe I'd just removed from the inner reaches of my nose and asked, "Are you sure?"
"Of course I'm sure", she snapped. "Stop being a baby and get on with it."
I eventually succeeded in completing the test, although it did take two replacement probes due to me having boked twice. The next day, my somewhat-sheepish wife admitted she'd gotten the order wrong, and I should have done my throat first and then my nose.
Before I could complain, she added, "That's what you get for waking me at that hour of the morning."
Thankfully, the throat-nose test has been superseded with a nose-only one; this, however, has led to a different problem. The new probes are significantly shorter and patently not designed for a proboscis of O'Kane dimensions.
To get the thing where it's needed involves me pushing it so far up, I live in fear it might disappear beyond the point of retrieval.
So, when I finally tested positive at 3.30am one morning, I made sure to rush upstairs and waken my wife with the exciting news. Well, as I've said, I hate to suffer alone, and its important you share everything in a marriage, be it sickness, health or boking doing a Covid test.
