The foreigners at my company were loaded up on buses today, in three different shifts, to get tested for the ‘rona. Annoyingly, the local staff will not be tested. Reasoning? “They’ve been here for more than 2 months.” Ridiculous. So have the foreigners! They made us get in by March 1, and we did! I got in on … February 28, I think? Today is April 30! We were fuming.
They also got a sneaky blood test in, which the foreign staff concluded was probably a drug test because you may as well test the dirty foreigners while you’ve got them trapped.
While waiting for my coronavirus test, it was interesting to watch the medical staff go about their business. One of them stayed in the same PPE gear, but helped the person who was doing the actual swabbing to change medical gowns and gloves between every person who was tested.
The coronavirus nose swab went all the way up my nose. I didn’t know it could go that far, even though I did all those anatomy classes. I assumed there would be some sort of narrowing of the opening, the way that you can’t really shove your finger the whole way up your nose because the narrowed opening just won’t let the finger through. I started giggling. The nose swab took a little too long; they really do spend some time swirling about with the swab in there.
The throat swab, however. I gagged and started coughing because they were taking so long to swirl and swirl and swirl and swirllllll in there. It was not fun. I gestured to Lindsay, behind me, that it was not a fun experience.
Next, to the blood test tent. This was unhygienic, as always, just like during the visa physical/health exam at the city’s immigration health test center. The staffer was fumbling about with cotton balls and packages of butterfly syringes, and wearing the same gloves throughout — but we were told it’s okay because they put hand sanitizer on the gloves between tests. I watched her clean off her gloves with hand sanitizer and found myself thinking, Does that not degrade the latex?
Anyway, that was my half-day at work today, which wasn’t that bad at all.
In other news, I am so, so pleased that my meal plan is working! I was 55.4 kg before, and today is Day 55 and I’m now 50.7 kg! I tried on an old trenchcoat that had been getting tight and found that … it now fits me perfectly, just like before! I was so thrilled I started doing those little screams, and I cannot remember having been this happy for a long, long time.
Unfortunately I can’t actually tell anybody because they’ll just accuse me of losing too much. I wasn’t, and I’m not. My body fat percentage was at 29.9%, which is way higher than it should be.
I had a strange moment after arriving back in my neighborhood after the coronavirus test. I suddenly got dizzy, probably from the lack of breakfast and also from the blood test? But it was only a small amount of blood! I knew something was wrong and that I needed to either get home quickly or sit down before I fell over and hit my head on the ground or something like that. It passed after two long, long minutes, but I’m still a bit worried about what that was.
To end this post, I will say that I am the healthiest I have ever been, for a long time. Typically, my resting heart rate was in the 90s. I don’t know why. It has always been like that, and the earliest I can remember was having my heart rate taken at age 12, and I remember wondering why it was so far outside the normal range.
I finally got it down to the 70s when I was waiting tables as a server, always moving around. I’ve been checking it all week, excitedly, and I’m now in the low 70s and high 60s. It’s crazy! This is so good! I am so, so pleased.
