[DISCLAIMER: I want to start this off by saying that I did everything I could to avoid COVID-19 and took necessary precautions. I always wore my mask, avoided large crowds vehemently and only saw a small group of friends. However, someone in my ‘circle of safety’ came into contact with someone who tested positive, and you can guess the rest…]
Tasteless charcuterie boards, emergency evacuation from my sorority house and three positive COVID-19 test results — This is a peek into my past three weeks.
I consider myself a relatively positive person. I attempt yoga. I have an ‘empowerment’ Pinterest board. I follow Harry Styles, “Treat People with Kindness,” like my religion. But sometimes unfortunate circumstances sweep into your life and leave you speechless. I still don’t have the perfect words to describe my past month, but one thing is for sure: in every dark room, there’s light to be found and a heck of a story to be told.
I first found out I had come into contact with COVID-19 at 9 p.m. on a Friday. It was the evening before the Florida vs LSU game, and Florida fans everywhere were betting on scores, planning game day outfits and praying for a great season. However, this was not the case for my roommates and I. We sat in our shoebox of a room, huddled over our phones, calling every person we knew trying to find somewhere to quarantine for the next two weeks with less than 12 hours of notice. Needless to say, this was not an easy task. By some stretch of luck, one of us had a family friend who was on vacation in the Grand Canyon and gave us the OK to inhabit her place while she was gone.
We jumped at our opportunity and ran with it! Four hours of sleep, a full tank of gas later and two hours on the road, we ended up in a house in Tampa none of us had ever been in before. We were beyond grateful to have somewhere to quarantine, although at that point we were doing it just as a precaution. We didn’t have any symptoms and were presumed we were negative. As I’m sure you can tell based on the title of this article, we were wrong.
I laugh as a coping mechanism. When I watch horror movies, I laugh. When I’m startled, I laugh. When I opened up my positive test result, I laughed so hard I couldn’t breathe. Looking back, this might have been a premonition of my symptoms to come. While my roommates, Grace, Josie and I all had drastically different symptoms, there is one thing for sure: COVID-19 is no hoax. I had to go to the doctor for an inhaler. Josie felt so sick she couldn’t eat and Grace called it quits at 8 p.m. every night to sleep for 13 hours.
I’m telling you this not so you can pity us, but so you can understand our mentality. Kicked out of our housing, positive for COVID-19 in a house we had never been in before and afraid of what was to come. We were not at rock bottom…we were in the basement.
We had a decision to make: We could either let this plague our mentality, stay inside all day and isolate ourselves further from the world around us, or we could use our circumstances to spend quality time with one another and make the best of a dreary situation.
Not surprisingly, we chose the latter option. We got contact-less delivery and made dinner together. When Josie lost her sense of taste, we made her try all the food in the house. She thought chocolate cake tasted like apple sauce. We had a Halloween movie night on Oct. 1st and were each other’s hype women when it came time for exams and presentations. We went on walks when we could (away from the public, of course) and even had our own three-person party when Grace turned 20. Sure, there were days when we slept all day and didn’t feel bright and shiny, but we tried our best to remain positive and support one another. And it worked! We came out of this situation happier and closer to one another than we were before.
Sometimes bad things happen. You fail a test, get in a fight with a friend, or if you’re us, get COVID-19. You’re allowed to mourn your losses, but don’t throw the towel in. Making the best of the situation even when you don’t feel like it, can have an uplifting impact on your wellbeing. When life goes low, take the high route.