Isolating in Cyprus, recovering, and trying to get into the system...

Continuing the post I wrote ten days ago, about being ill, confusing test results and voluntary self-isolation. 

I was reassured by comments telling me I was doing the right thing, and suggestions that I should continue isolating until a home test proved negative, whatever the official rules might be.

The day after writing the email I mentioned, on the morning of Wednesday 12th January, I had a phone call in response. A helpful man with limited English told me I should go to the New Hospital for a PCR test at 7.30pm that evening. I had to turn left at the parking, he told me, and wait at the old container.

At around 3.30pm he called again and said that if I wanted to, I could go immediately. 

Of course it meant Richard and I had to be in the car together rather than isolating from each other, but we both wore masks. Since he hadn't caught it on the two days when I had symptoms but was testing negative with the home test, I didn't think there was a huge risk by this stage, when I no longer had any symptoms. Perhaps the PCR would prove negative, and I wouldn't be in the system at all...

The test wasn't too uncomfortable, and I assumed I would hear the result by the following morning. No, the doctor told  me, this wasn't  a quick PCR. This was a slow one, so I would hear in three or four days.  

I was not impressed! It was six days, already, after having had the first symptoms. But I knew I needed to keep isolating. So I didn't leave the house. We continued sleeping in different rooms, spending most of our days in other different rooms, and I wore a mask when I went into the kitchen or living room.

On Saturday, January 15th, I thought I was improving. The cold symptoms seemed to have gone, and I really wanted to get the house clean and aired, the bedding changed, and life beginning to be back to normal. So, feeling hopeful, I did another home test. 

It proved positive.

I wasn't happy. I stayed in my study, venturing out into the rest of the house in a mask to do as little as I could, and gradually realised I was still extremely tired. Perhaps it was as well that I wasn't trying to clean the entire house. We postponed our usual get-together with friends for Sunday and I knew I wouldn't be going to church. 

Then there was an update in the papers, about isolation periods, due to be implemented on 17th January. While some other countries were reducing the isolation period to seven or even five days (with negative home test to release them), Cyprus was making it longer. Instead of ten days from onset of symptoms, it became ten days after the first positive test. The only good thing was that no longer do doctors have to be involved - the article states that, 'The citizens will be automatically informed on the mobile phone with an SMS the night before their release.'

On Sunday 16th, I finally received a text message from the Ministry of Health with my PCR result. Actually, it was four text messages: two in Greek, two saying the same things in English. 

The first one said, in capital letters, 'Your Covid19 test is positive. Please self-isolate, inform your contacts and contact your general practitioner. You can find the official guidelines at https://bit.ly/2ZZEbtd". 

I had, of course, already informed my contacts, such as they were, and they had done tests to ensure they were Covid-free. I hadn't seen anyone other than Richard for over a week, and had kept my distance from him. 

The second text message told me that in order to submit contact tracing data, and to get a certificate of recovery, I had to fill in an online form. It gave me a code to enable me to do that, so I did. It felt rather like the cliché of shutting the stable door after the horse had bolted but I wanted to show willing. So I filled in all my information again, made up a Greek spelling of my name (which was required in addition to the English spelling), and listed Richard and the friend I had seen most recently (eight days beforehand) as two contacts. Both are fully vaccinated and boosted so would not be required to isolate or have tests... but I assumed they would both get a message from the ministry of health.

But, over a week later, neither of them had heard anything. 

On Monday morning last week, I felt considerably better. By then it was two weeks after my likely exposure to Covid, ten full days after my first symptoms. It was eight days after my first positive test. By the regulations of most other countries, I would be free to go out and about, considered non-infectious. 

But I wanted to be sure, so I did another home test. And, hallelujah, it was negative!

They don't have QR codes here, and there was no way to inform anyone official, but we reckoned that meant I was no longer in danger to anyone. So I spent Monday airing and cleaning the house, doing extra laundry, and no longer wearing a mask. It felt as if I were no longer 'unclean', and it was awesome to be able to hug my husband again. 

Possibly I did too much as I was exhausted by about 6pm, but I was very relieved to think that life was getting back to normal again, and that I had escaped reasonably lightly. 

On Tuesday I emailed an address I found, for queries about release from isolation. I had no response, not even an automated one. Since I had decided I wanted to be in the system,  I thought I had better stick to the rules of not going out, even though friends came over, satisfied that I wasn't going to infect them. 

By Friday. I still hadn't heard anything. By Friday, it was two weeks after my first positive home test. I didn't go to the shops; my 'safepass', according to the local press, would not work (although when Richard scanned it with his CovScan application, it showed as fine). In the evening, we went to our friends' house but I was more tired than I had realised, and we left early. I really hoped I might get a 'release' text on Friday evening, ten days after my second positive home test. But nothing came.

On Saturday, I went out for an early morning walk with my friend, for the first time in a couple of weeks. I couldn't walk very fast, and felt that we had to turn back before we reached our usual destination. It was good to be out, although it's been very cold recently. Even the flamingoes seem to have got the message about distancing, although in this photo they just look like tiny white blobs:

I know, I really shouldn't have left the house at all until I'd had my release text. But if my lab antigen test on Monday10th had been positive (as I'm sure it would have been if they had done it correctly) I'd have been released, at least in theory, a couple of days beforehand. And it wasn't as if I were seeing lots of people. 

Much as I enjoyed the walk, I was very tired by the time I got home. There's a cough, too; not as frequent as it was a week earlier, but quite hacking and unpleasant when it hits. Usually when I get cold, or when I'm talking. Hot drinks help, as does staying warm. And I do want to get a bit fitter again, but walking even a couple of kilometres appears to be as much as I can manage so far. 

I felt wiped out for the rest of Saturday and had another early night... but just as I was about to go to sleep, I heard two messages on my phone in quick succession.

At last!  My official release text, in both English and Greek. 

But that's not the end of the saga. 

My second vaccination (Astra Zeneca) was on July 7th 2021. In Cyprus, we were told to wait six months before booking a booster, so I had planned to have it as soon as possible after 7th January.  That guidance did in fact change mid-December to allow a five-and-a-half month gap. But it didn't seem like a great idea to have a booster right before Christmas. Besides, I didn't suppose I was at much risk... so I had booked it for January 11th. Obviously, I had to cancel since by that stage I was isolating. Even that wasn't straightforward, but Richard eventually found the right phone number and succeeded in doing so. 

While opinion is divided about how soon after having Covid one should have a booster, most of the advice I found recommends at least a month. In Cyprus 'safe passes' for vaccinations expire seven months after the second dose, if no booster has been given. That would mean that from February 7th my vaccination pass would no longer be valid for shopping or church or anywhere else I might want to go, unless I had the booster before that date, and I wanted to wait. 

No problem... or so I thought. Instead of continuing to use my vaccination safe pass, I could get a new one based on my having had Covid. That would be valid for at least three months, so I could wait a bit longer before booking the booster.

So on Sunday morning Richard used his phone app to try to get a new safe pass for me. But when he selected 'recovery from Covid', it told him that the system couldn't find a release certificate for me. He tried a couple of times, and I tried on my computer - nothing worked.

Perhaps, we thought optimistically, it would take 24 hours to update. 

So we tried again this morning, and it still didn't work. 

At the bottom of the page was a hotline number for questions, so Richard called that. And a helpful guy said, 'Oh, yes, it's wrong. I will update it. Try again in twenty minutes'. 

We rolled our eyes a little - surely the system should have automated it...? - and he tried again twenty minutes later.

This time it found the certificate. It produced a safe pass. 

But my name was spelled wrongly.  Not just one spelling error (which, in Cyprus, really wouldn't matter as spelling does tend to be variable for proper nouns) but THREE mistakes.  One in each of my three names. Since places checking safe passes are also supposed to check IDs, I thought it should really be more accurate than that. And where had it picked up the wrong spelling anyway...? We will probably never know. 

So Richard called the hotline AGAIN and someone else said that she would correct it. It's a tad concerning that all it takes is a phone call to have something like that edited... but 'this is Cyprus'. 

Sure enough, it worked. 

Well, almost. 

My middle name is given as part of my surname rather than as part of my first name, but at least the spelling is correct.

I now have a safe pass valid until July 7th. That's six months away. I don't plan to wait that long before my booster, unless Omicron proves to be the end of the pandemic (as some hopeful experts have suggested might possibly be the case) in which case I might not have one at all. But assuming it continues, I really don't want to risk another infection. I know my case was mild; I don't have any underlying conditions and I'm reasonably healthy. And I've had two vaccinations. But it wasn't pleasant, the lingering cough is nasty, and I'm still not back to my usual energy levels. 

Does it ever get cold in Cyprus?

Before we moved to Cyprus, we had a vague idea that it might sometimes be 'a little chilly' at nights. So, as we arrived at the end of October, we did ensure we had a few sweaters, light-weight jackets, a couple of blankets, and our thin duvet.

Overwhelmed at what seemed, at the time, the exhausting heat of  ::shock horror::  26C in the shade, when the UK was about to experience the first frost of the season, I was pretty sure we weren't going to need even that light-weight warmth. When our landlady showed us how to use the kerosene heater, I couldn't believe we would ever need it.

Experience, and a measure of acclimitisation have taught us otherwise. We breathe a sigh of relief when the weather cools to a 'pleasant' 26C by the end of October. And while we don't get frosts at sea-level in Cyprus, the nights can feel really quite cold in the winter (approximately December, January and February) and since houses are designed, primarily, for the summer with tiled floors and high ceilings, it can often feel colder inside than out.

So we were very pleased to discover an effective central heating system when we bought our house seven-and-a-half years ago. I already wrote about how cold it suddenly became, early in December, when our heating unaccountably didn't work.  Thankfully it is now working, although the weather has become somewhat warmer; but the heating still comes on first thing in the morning, and during the evening. We set our thermostat to about 15-16C and wear several layers of clothes indoors.

Sophia, who has taken to sleeping in my beanbag much of the day, is always pleased when she finds it close to a warm radiator:

One advantage of winter is that there aren't too many mosquitoes, and we don't see cockroaches at all. A disadvantage is that we're much more likely to catch colds. Thankfully we only had minor ones over Christmas: a bit of a sniffle, a slight lingering cough. Nothing compared to the long flu-like colds and coughs we suffered from a year ago, thankfully. 

But in the past week we seem to have developed a different kind of cold; Richard wasn't well at night, a couple of times, and couldn't sleep. Tim totally lacked energy on Wednesday, and took a long siesta when he arrived home from work; he cancelled most of his commitments on Thursday, and is only really feeling like himself again today. I was coughing more yesterday, and felt exhausted and drained... not so bad today, but rather brain-fogged. 

An advantage of having a relatively mild winter with no frosts in Cyprus is that bedding plants do well during the winter months, and geraniums produce a terrific display:

I'm not a fan of pink in general, but I do like it on these amazing plants. 

Recovering from coughs...?

There have been a lot of coughs and colds around, this winter. Sometimes people assume that, living in Cyprus, we are immune to such things - but that's not the case at all. We seem to have had more bugs and viruses since living here than we ever did in the UK. They last longer, too. 

It doesn't make sense... we get plenty of sunshine here, and we eat more healthfully than we ever did in the UK, with the wide variety of locally grown produce available so inexpensively. I don't volunteer in a classroom as I did in the UK; I don't even teach Sunday School or help at Mothers and Tots any more. This year, with all the walking, I am fitter than I used to be. 

Yet it's only today, around eight weeks after Christmas, that I begin to feel as if I'm truly on the mend. 

Perhaps it's just related to getting older. Sigh. 

We caught the colds shortly before the New Year, when we were probably a bit run-down after the short but unpleasant norovirus bug just before Christmas. The colds didn't last long, but the coughs lingered... and lingered.  We didn't really slow down much, but felt constantly tired and decidedly under par. 

Richard seemed to have recovered from his cough in the last week of January, when he flew to Italy for a week. A couple of days after returning home, he started a worse cold which was possibly the flu for a couple of days. He is pretty sure he caught it from someone he spent time with while he was away. By then I had almost stopped coughing from the first cold.. but, unsurprisingly, caught the second one about a week after Richard did. And felt decidedly rotten for some time. 

I still managed my walks with Sheila, but when she and her family went away for a few weeks, it was a lot harder to feel motivated. I think I've been three times in a little over two weeks... and only once thought to take a photo:

We don't tend to visit doctors here. We could - we have insurance, and they're pretty good here, but we prefer to use home remedies wherever possible. So we've been drinking copious amounts of hot lemon and honey (lemons supplied by friends who grow them, so fresh and organic).  We've been eating a lot of onions and garlic, too. I did buy some herbal lozenges, and some liquorice ones too (for Richard), which seemed to help. But the coughs continued, and our energy levels have been decidedly low.

Oddly, the end of this particular bug seems to be worse than the beginning.  The cough seems to get better, only to be replaced by a horrible sore throat. And that subsides a day or two later, followed by a feeling of the throat having swelled, of swallowing being difficult and wind being trapped.  A couple of nights last week I was up at 2am coughing uncontrollably, and had to have a hot drink before it calmed down. 

I would have been more concerned, perhaps... but it was following exactly the same pattern that Richard's virus did a week or so earlier.

About a week ago I felt the need for something warm against my chest. I wished we had a hot water bottle. We did buy some, years ago, but they weren't great quality. Or perhaps they perished in the Cyprus summers. In any case, we had too many problems to bother with them again.  

But inspiration struck. I had a bag of 'wheat berries', bought ages ago and never used, and a lot of random material which, years ago, we used for making juggling balls. It was the work of a moment to cut out a suitable sized rectangle and hand-sew it together, filling with the wheat: 

Not exactly beautiful, but I'm hardly going to use that material for anything on display. 

Two-and-a-half minutes in the microwave (with a half cup of water next to it) and I have a warm and cosy bag to cuddle.  It feels very good indeed.  Cleo, our oldest cat, rather likes it too....

I did walk on Thursday, having read that exercise and early morning air were good for pretty much any infection, but on Saturday woke too late, and felt too tired.  Yet today, at last, the coughing has eased and I'm beginning to feel as if my full health is returning.  I hope so. It has been a very mild winter, even for Cyprus, and is rather a shock to realise that March will be starting this week.