“At least it’s quick,” says a nurse, looking as sympathetic as a person can in full PPE when pulling what looks like an extra-long, one-side Q-tip out of another person’s nostril.
My eyes tear up instantly and involuntarily.
I’m sitting in my Hyundai Accent in a drive-thru tent at a mobile COVID-19 testing site set up in Burnaby’s Central Park.
I’ve just given a sample from deep inside my nose (a nasopharyngeal swab).
Look up a diagram online, and you’ll see the swab stops just short of your brain.
The series of events that brought me here started this morning when I woke up with a headache and a sore throat.
All day I gauged these symptoms and others – an occasional cough, fatigue, a tightness in my chest.
I looked over the B.C. Centre for Disease Control COVID symptom list two or three times, willing myself into one course of action or another.
Fever? Nope, don’t have that one.
Hey Siri. Does COVID always cause a fever? No, eh?
It’s still probably just allergies though…
But it says here COVID symptoms “may suddenly worsen” after someone has mild symptoms. That sounds bad, and I’ve read some bad stories online.
Maybe I’ll just check that temperature again.
How could I have gotten it, though? I’ve been distancing since mid-March, handwashing, sticking to my three-person isolation pod – Ice Pod, as we like to call ourselves.
Maybe it was the grocery store, the avocadoes. Maybe I adjusted my glasses, after testing them for firmness, and that’s where the virus hopped on, biding its time until I adjusted my glasses again and then touched my face.
And now here I am, with symptoms.
I clicked through Burnaby’s online self-assessment tool, and it told me the health ministry is “recommending testing for anyone with cold, flu or COVID-19-like symptoms, even mild ones” and directed me to the Burnaby testing site.
I hemmed and hawed and took my temperature again until my partner told me, “Just get tested, already!”
I finally agreed but pulled over twice on the way there, going through the list of symptoms again, feeling the glands in my neck.
Do I even feel sick anymore?
In the end, I pulled into the site and sheepishly took the paperwork and surgical mask handed to me through a half open window via one of those long grabber tools used to pick up garbage.
I was directed to the first of two drive-thru tents, where a man swathed in head-to-toe PPE asked me about my symptoms and punched my information into a laptop set up at a folding table inside the tent.
At the second tent, the nurse has just pulled the swab from my nose.
I won’t be called with the results, the nurse tells me, but she says I should call my doctor or look up the results online after three days to make sure.
In conclusion/inconclusive
Three days later, I’m already feeling better, so it’s no surprise when I log into myehealth.ca and see the test came back negative.
No worries, I tell myself. I’m glad I went. Now I know.
It made for a fun story a few days later when I was talking to my son’s girlfriend, a nurse.
“At least it was quick,” I said.
It shouldn’t have been, though, she said.
According to her, the end of that long Q-tip should have been swiveled around on my nasopharynx a few times before being pulled out.
Sure enough, there it is on the YouTube videos – recommendations for everything from one quick twirl to a few seconds of twirling to twirling up to 15 seconds.
I definitely would have noticed if that thing had been in my nostril for 15 seconds – the awkward pause alone would have driven that home.
So now here I am at my laptop a few days later with a sore throat and a stuffy nose.
Am I getting sick?
I’m sure it’s just allergies…
Where’s that thermometer at?
