Tell it to SunStar: Covid-19: A temporary inconvenience

It’s been a year since the coronavirus disease (Covid-19) was declared a pandemic with worldwide impact.

Everyone had their own anxieties over the extent of inconvenience affecting their daily ways and means.

With my wife at the household are a doctor son (at the hospital frontlines taking care of affected patients), our nurse daughter in the United States who is with her family at the US east coast, myself, employed in a manufacturing facility (until December 2020 when I reached my retirement age), we remained close-knit, updating each other of our itineraries and if these can lead or not to possible exposure to the virus.

Hearing of high hospital admissions from our son, we strictly imposed safety measures on ourselves and committed to only doing essential errands. Moreover, the tight mandate from our government to wear covers on our faces kept us free of the virus. Until late last week.

By a stroke of misfortune, my son got infected from his Covid-19 positive patient. Being a first contact at the household, we all were subjected to swab tests last weekend.

My wife and I obliged per our village guidelines with the protocols. Our house was placed on lockdown with a yellow tape tied around our gate. Our son is being isolated at the hospital where he’s working, but he assured us he’s medically capable to handle his predicament and he remained confident he can be on the road to a fast recovery with his mild case.

At first we thought depression would be our state of mind, sensing that people were talking (perhaps others gossiping) about our house on lockdown as we’re the latest addition to the new cases list. On the contrary, we felt highly uplifted by the support from kind-hearted neighbors who offered to assist us should we need help with our household consumption. The constant calls from our siblings and the usual amusement provided by our two grandchildren encouraged us to overcome this temporary inconvenience.

Our current “misfortunes” are just blessings in disguise. God purposely gave this change as everything that occurs in life change. And change is the only permanent thing to happen.

There’s always something good that comes out of every life experience. Good times give us good memories while bad times like this give us experiences. All to gain, nothing to lose.

Accepting and facing reality is always the norm as we move forward.

We continue to stay safe, abide by the guidelines while this virus is still raging.

God bless.

(Author is dealing with Covid-19 in the family. Name withheld on his request.)