The 2020 Throwback Nobody Wanted

Kate Fennessy
8 min readJan 7, 2022

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It’s Day 4 of our isolation.

I’ve just woken up from another not-so-great sleep — my alarm jolting me from a dream where I was with a lot of people in a huge house, away somewhere, realising slowly that my throat was getting sorer and more phlegmy… I decided to do my Rapid Antigen Test there and then.

As I was getting the little kit set up on the arm of someone’s chair, another group member declared she had just tested positive.

“You realise you’re all gonna get it?”, I was saying to people sitting around a wide circle of sofa chairs, including my brother. “You’re ok with that?” I knew it was too late for them either way.

That dream has made me feel a bit sad this morning. For one, there’s the slight sting of nostalgia — the ache of briefly experiencing the feeling of being away with a heap of people from various households… It certainly doesn’t seem like that’ll be on the cards for a while yet — and the fact that it even feels nostalgic at all is also still odd.

And then to know that Covid and testing and these godforsaken Rapid Antigen Tests — we’re calling them RATs here in Australia, the new thing is to go “RAT hunting” — has already infiltrated my dreams? Kind of sucks too.

As I lay there this morning rousing my conscious mind, I scanned myself for reality. No, my throat is not sore or phlegmy, and no, I’m not going to open up the one precious RAT we have in the house which I’m meant to use on Day 6 as a “close contact”. And yes, I have another day of remote work ahead of me today, and then it’s the weekend (except I won’t be stepping out of the front door again until Tuesday), and everything is ok, except for that fact that it feels like everything around me is suddenly really not at all ok.

My 18 year old daughter has Covid. She’s been isolating in the back of the house since we found out on Tuesday. She was doing much better yesterday, and I’d even say she’s on the other side of it now. It came and went pretty quickly.

I knew she’d get it once I started adding it all up — she’s a teenager who did her final school year in 2020, who was robbed of a graduation, a formal, and really any significant gatherings in that once revered time as your “coming out” as a young adult. Her 18th was a subdued family lunch at a local brewery.

My policy with her has been to say “enjoy!”, every time she tells me she has a plan or an idea or is doing something in between lockdowns; the troughs between peaks. The silent caveat: we don’t know what’s around the corner. So when she said she was going to an outdoor New Years’ Eve event, I said, “enjoy!”

Every single friend that she went with to that New Years’ Eve event, either has, or has recently had Covid, or is being tested for it.

What I saw in the photos from that night as a mother though? How happy she looks.

When we saw the two lines, and our eyes met, I got a rush of a 2020 throwback feeling — the ground shifting beneath us, my reptilian brain trying to sort through immediate dangers and information. First, I told her, try and get a PCR test — that would make it official and get her into the system for payments and support from the health department. Then we focused on moving her to the back of the house. She had to set it up by herself, even though she wasn’t feeling well.

Then my parenting brain: I need to know what to look out for if she gets worse. She’d had two doses of AstraZeneca, the least effective against Omicron. She hadn’t qualified for her booster yet.

I need to order groceries online. We need masks by the doorway to her area. She needs Nurofen and Hydralyte. Anything else? I told her to wake me up in the night if she feels weird, or worse. I re-read the signs of worsening symptoms.

I am messaging everyone frantically and I can feel my energy is both flummoxed and hyped up. A concentrated madness, a mix of humour and mania.

We need more RATs. I need to test and isolate along with her for seven days, I was realising, and test myself on Day 1 and Day 6. I try to get my head around not being able to leave the house, even for a walk. Walks were my one escape during lockdowns, my main outlet, my steadier.

She manages to get a PCR test that day, and the results that night — positive.

I park myself with my laptop on the couch, the rolling news updates on in the background, just like in early 2020. I begin the search out in the world for a RAT, rejected by store after store with signs written hurriedly in texta or printed out carefully with underlines and in all caps: NO RAPID ANTIGEN TESTS. SOLD OUT. SORRY.

Was it reasonable to want to burst into tears? My brain tries to hold onto my new To Do list. I must get tested. I am trying to get tested. Will Emi be ok? She was very sick with pneumonia as a child. Will she be on the wrong side of the stats? What if she suddenly goes really pale and floppy — what will I do then? No-one can enter my house. I’ll be alone with this. I am alone with this.

The worst realisation of all was that I’d be scared to call the hospital. The Ambulance service here briefly went into code red this week, not able to attend to calls promptly, not even able to answer the phone for 15 minutes in one instance. Our hospitals are breaking. Wondering if my daughter suddenly got really sick and our health system couldn’t help her was a feeling I’ve never had in my life before. I’m vulnerable, and my daughter’s sick with a scary new disease and the safety net, the one I’ve never even had to think about before, is fraying before our eyes.

I tried for about four hours that first day to find a RAT or get a PCR test, to no avail. The rejections kept hitting me in the face, even though I knew that wasn’t logical, or anyone’s fault. I kept re-ordering things in my brain. Go home, you won’t get a bloody test. No-one else is getting a test today either. Is Emi still ok?

I found out about a local journalist sharing stories live on her Instagram. Slide after slide of messages from panicked Melbournians. Try here? No, sold out. Waiting in line here! Site is now closed.

It was hopeless; I came home. No Day 1 test for me.

That night I snuck in to Emi’s room, mask on, and took a photo of her. She’d fallen asleep with the TV blaring and her glasses on.

My worry that night gently crested, akin to having a newborn in the house for the first time. Will she still be ok in the morning?

Emi was a bit worse that morning; pale. She slept a lot. She said the headache and the body aches were worse. She said her eyes were hot.

Day 2 for me was more of the same — I felt better prepared but it didn’t alter the outcome. Turned away from testing sites in the morning, the blank faces of traffic controllers repeating the same news to me as everyone else. “But I’m just trying to do the right thing!” I wanted to scream. I wanted to burst into tears, but didn’t see the point. “Why is my city not working?” “Are we ok?” Weird questions I’ve never had to ask myself. “Am I ok?” It didn’t change anything. I still needed a RAT or a PCR test and couldn’t get either.

My brother arrived in the afternoon with two RATs. I don’t think he understood the relief that gave me. I did my first test, and it was negative. More relief.

Emi was feeling better that night, her colour had returned. We were turning a corner.

By Day 3, she had started to come good, thank god, but everything else around us was starting to feel worse.

My online grocery order arrived by taxi, five hours late. This was met with confusion from both me — again masked up in my own home — and the taxi driver.

Our Prime Minister said we have no choice but to “ride the wave”. This feels alarming, after two years of building the dam wall.

Australia is soaring up the charts of global cases per million. We used to top of list of the lowest.

Nurses are confessing that they are being asked to work when they’re positive and symptomatic, in full PPE. A nurse this morning in Sydney quit over the “chaotic and dangerous conditions”.

I’m getting email newsletters now from my supermarket warning of supply shortages. There are photos circulating of empty meat cases; fruit and veggies too.

Melbourne has kicked the world’s top tennis player out of our airport, and most people are applauding that. He’s in the same inner-city hotel as refugees, some who’ve been in detention for nine years. The contrast is heart-breaking; the attention one man receives over their endless plight. Who even are we?

When I was RAT-hunting, the streets looked eerily like a self-imposed lockdown had occurred. Cafes and restaurants are dropping like flies. The updates are always the same, “due to staff shortages/isolating staff/Covid cases…” It’s a mess out there. I happily stay behind the closed front door for now.

Emi is pretty much back to normal. I can hear her giggling with friends over Messenger. Her main complaints now are regular teenage ones: hunger, boredom. She’s watching Harry Potter movies. I’m watching the new Queer Eye season, grateful the sweet stories allow to me freely cry.

In moments, it’s oddly relaxing, as if we’re on a holiday and just choosing to chill out in different spaces in the house. It’s quiet. The cat wanders in between the new zones of the house. The cat probably has Covid.

Do I have Covid? Will I? What will I do then? I’ll find out on Day 6, on Sunday. Someone shared a graph that showed that rapid tests don’t pick up positives as quickly as PCR’s do. That set off a new worry that’s now slowly building until Sunday. At least I have a bloody RAT. What a strange sentence to say, along with all the other strange sentences.

In 2020, I wrote about “defeating the second wave”. Ha! How quickly that has dated, overthrown by the new ruler, Omicron; the second wave now barley a blip.

I just hope this piece dates quickly too, replaced by waves of relief at the sharp drop in cases, a return to making plans and only ever worrying about rats of the small and furry kind… In the meantime, I guess we just continue to strap in and hold on.

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Kate Fennessy
Kate Fennessy

Written by Kate Fennessy

Communications specialist, obsessive journaller; require routine and spontaneity in equal measure.