Transubstantiation, the revenge

There was that phase last week where I was getting fairly worked up about the possible risks of attending a church service for Noah’s first communion, but managed to talk myself down and pluck up the courage to attend without suffering a panic attack somewhere between the gospel reading and the offering. I told myself that, statistically, 20 per cent of the people in the room have had at least one shot of the vaccine. We’d be spread out. People would have taken precautions.

Ha! Turns out the priest was coronavirus positive the whole time. We found out yesterday and are now in wait-and-see mode. This is what comes of letting down one’s guard during this kind of thing.

In the priest’s defense, he had no idea he was coronavirus positive. He had no symptoms and had only submitted to a test on the Friday because it was required before he could undergo a different medical procedure on Monday. He was as shocked as anyone else when he got turned away from the clinic on Monday because of the test.

So, here we are, shaking our fists at the universe and, to a certain degree, the Catholic Church. Emma took a coronavirus test on Tuesday because that’s school policy and Christina took one, also on Tuesday, because of a separate coronavirus scare at work. Both came up negative, though an infection on Sunday most likely wouldn’t be detectable by Tuesday. So, we’ll have another round of testing on Wednesday and then probably every two to three days after that, because that’s how you spell ‘fun’ during a pandemic.

I am so mad at so many things right now, myself included. Because, ultimately, I could have chosen to be the bad guy and said “No, we’re not doing this,” but I didn’t want to deny Noah one slice of normal after the last couple of years, so I sucked up my fears and hoped that everything would be OK. But we should all know by now that hope doesn’t really get you that far when it comes to messing with medical problems.

It comes down to this. Stripped down to its essentials, you have kids because you think it’s a good idea for your genes to survive another generation or so. If you don’t manage to keep the kids alive, you’ve failed. Through no fault of our own – I mean, we did everything we could – we failed Colin. Maybe that wording is too harsh. But there’s no denying that the cancer won. We don’t even get much of a concession prize, unless you count memories. And now, because I didn’t want to rock the boat and because we trusted other people to be on top of things, we ended up taking another unacceptable risk and are once again in limbo. It’s maddening.