Two and a half years ago my family and I traveled to Marrakech. We wanted to soak in the sun by a pool one last time before the Swedish dark winter months would swallow us. The hotel was lovely; situated outside the city, authentic decorations, beautiful gardens and peacocks and cats walking around the property. The food was also wonderful. At least the first evening.

Upon waking on our first morning in Morocco I found my husband in the toilet, our two teenagers in the toilet in their room and for the remainder of our one-week stay I ran around with water bottles, toilet rolls and Coca-Cola between the two rooms. I will never forget the reaction of the staff: there’s been a shift in weather, suddenly it’s very hot again, that must be why your family is sick. I tried to explain to them that you don’t puke your guts out day in and day out because of the weather – that they should check their food. Unfortunately they were not very open to this suggestion. Anyway, after a week and with the help of medication from a doctor we called to the hotel, we flew home, washed our clothes and stored away our flip-flops.

Fast forward 2.5 years.
We lived through a pandemic…
Back to the flip-flops:

My husband took his flip-flops out of our hallway closet a few days ago and there was a layer of actual dust on them. If dust on flip-flops is not a metaphor for living through a pandemic, I don’t know what is!

At the moment my husband is hiking in the mountains of Gran Canaria with a friend. I chose to stay at home for several reasons. The first one: I want my first travel to be to the Netherlands, to finally see my parents and my best friend again. It’s been 2.5 years since we last saw each other. The second reason: I got covid again. (yes, you read that right) I had just managed to get my third vaccination, got sick from it a few days, felt better for one day and then I started to feel worse. I felt immediately that this was different from vaccine side-effects and a PCR test confirmed my suspicion. By the way, I also took three home antigen-tests. All three of them were negative. Just saying.

Anyway, I got covid again and I felt absolutely terrified the first days. I was so afraid that I would wake up in the middle of the night again, hardly being able to breathe. However this did not happen. I had a fever, cough, snot that could fill a pool, felt woozy in my brain and generally slow but I could breathe the whole time! What an incredible relief. I really don’t care much about a lot of symptoms, how unpleasant they are, as long as I can breathe.

I believe this is the effect of the vaccinations. Why? Because I still feel that my body doesn’t know how to deal with covid. The first time around it took my body 16.5 months to get back to living almost ‘normally’ again. This time, if it continues to improve in this rate, I believe I will have regained my full health in 2-3 weeks. Two to three weeks vs. sixteen and a half months!?! Incredible. The only significant difference between March 2020 and today is that my body has received three vaccinations. I have never loved science as much as I do today!

A really nice side-effect of getting infected again (look at how positive I can write about covid!) is the fact that this infection seems to clear away the persistent chest-issues I’ve had from the start. It’s not 100% gone yet, but I’m getting closer each day. It would mean so much if my chest would stop hurting soon! I’ve learned to live with this feeling, but it’s not nice and it’s also a daily reminder of covid in my life and my body that I’d be more than happy to get rid of.

So there you have it – a snapshot of my life at the moment. I look forward to the day that I can dust off my flip-flops too and find myself a pool somewhere, with a book, in the sun. That will be a glorious day! But for now I will continue on my path of healing from this latest covid infection. According to some news articles I’m now super-immune, and I really like the sound of that!

I will end with a quote I saw the other day, which captures accurately how I feel about my journey pretty much from my holiday in Marrakech to today:

Not all storms
come to
disrupt your life,
some come to
clear your path.

Thank you for reading! I hope you stay healthy and well ♥️

Photo: Gilles Seguin – unsplash.com