All the way up your hooter

 So the drill is that if you are a cas contact, you hie you away to the pharmacy to get yourself tested. If the test is positive, congratulations, you have covid and you must isolate yourself.

If, on the other hand, the test is negative, then you must test yourself two days, and again four days later, with the home test kits which are now on sale in our supermarkets.

Thus it was that yesterday found me wielding a rather long cotton bud. I put off doing the test as long as I felt I could, and set the appointed hour for 3pm. On opening the kit, obtained from a big pharmacy in the middle of the city about a week ago by Patricia, I traced the instructions, printed in  various segments and not in the correct order, but in several languages.

To my great relief the cotton bud does NOT have to reach the innermost parts of your nasal sinuses, like what they do at the pharmacy. It is enough to insert it about 4cm up your nostrils, one after the other.

I did it. I dripped two drops of the gloopy liquid on the test pad. I waited the prescribed ten minutes. The desired result is one stripe by the letter C. Otherwise, two stripes, one by the C, the other by the T, means you're infected. 

As I watched a dark bar spread across the test pad, and no lines appeared. I re-read the instructions. Pat read the instructions. We discussed the instructions. We tried to reinterpret the instructions. We reflected on the instructions. 

I got another test and probed my proboscis once more. This time my poor snitch protested by making me sneeze repeatedly for about 30 minutes. Dip, squeeze, stir, squeeze, drip drip.....

Result ! One bar ! By the C ! A negative result !

Rolls on Wednesday. 

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