Photo: Mine's an IPA...

This last weekend, Marie and I travelled to Off The Tracks, a music & beer festival across the not too distant Derbyshire border. We had a wonderful time over the four days - camping, watching live music, drinking exceptionally good beer - between listening to Test Match cricket at its best on Radio Five Live. I tell you - life doesn't get better than this.

By Thursday this week I'd tested positive for covid. Wednesday, I was coughing, Thursday coughing and feeling lousy - by Friday, coughing, feeling more lousy and actually quite scared. My rattling chest and breathing pains made for exceptionally hard going, my blood oxygen on the oximeter left on the doorstep by my eldest daughter read 91-92... a worryingly low level. In the desperate way of thinking that has from time to time blighted my life, I concocted my own made-up potion of paracetamol and ibuprofen mixed with powdered Lemsip, because I really could not take much more of the debilitating pain. It might be a 'man flu' syndrome thing but you women out there don't know how bad man flu can be. In the event, my anxiety declined, my breathing became less painful, my rattle and wheezing lessened - and my oxygen climbed back to 95-96 which is right where it normally should be. Of course, Marie went berserk, in her usual loving discerning manner - saying that over-the-counter drugs shouldn't be mixed like this - which is exactly right in that caring way she is.

Some years ago I was diagnosed with pneumonia, the cause of which today I can't exactly remember. At an ATM cashpoint I collapsed in an unconscious heap, a mystery guardian angel called the emergency medics before robbing me of the two-hundred quid in my wallet. My hospitalisation was brief, I walked out after seven hours laid on a trolley in an overcrowded corridor - but by the next day I was sheepishly back on the ward with double pneumonia. In 2019, I got the dengue fever in El Salvador - so I was never gonna be that high in the survival stakes against covid, nor are my overworked and ageing lungs worthy of donating to medical science. Earlier this year I got the two Pfizer vaccines. Let me tell you this - I'm in no doubt that Pfizer (or perhaps those marvellous festival beers) have since saved my bacon. Marie, she was with me at every twist & turn during the festival except when it was her turn to buy the beer. So why, I ask, is Marie testing negative? We've slept side-by-side, we've snogged and exchanged bodily fluids - so why is Marie cheerfully exuberant and still negative?

The many theories out there are mind-bogglingly wacky and bonkers. My true belief is that Pfizer saved me from something far more horrid - Marie maybe has a different make up, or her Zeneca vaccine is more suited to the Derbyshire sunshine climate. Maybe there was something different in our beers. These vaccines might not be to everyone's taste but they are the best and only defence against this ferocious and vicious virus. It's exceptional what these vaccine immunologists have achieved - it's also insane how the anti-vax brigadiers lie and spin such trollop.

Get vaccinated, don't listen to those who have no means of saving your life. Their lies will kill you. Get the vaccine.
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Footnote update: The day following the publication of this post, I was ambulanced into Accident & Emergency with pain to my lower left ribs, my chest and to my right front shoulder. X-rays and ECG showed inflammation to my spleen and to the cartilage muscles of my lungs - usual covid stuff. The doctor and ECG nurse explained that my blood oxygen levels were fine which, they said, is down to Pfizer vaccines. Not needing emergency oxygen I was discharged the next day. The ECG nurse also said that Pfizer and the other vaccines do not prevent Delta covid, but they hugely reduce the need for oxygen intensive care that generally goes on to damage vital organs.

It was like battle carnage in A&E, almost all covid. The nurse explained that most of the emergency admitted patients unvaccinated would be sent direct to ICU, a few with one vaccine but hardly anyone with both vaccines. Here in the UK, in the period between January and August 2021, there were 58,281 covid deaths, of those only 256 were double vaxed and these in the majority were over the age of eighty. 38,964 were unvaxed, the difference made up by those with only one vaccination or when the second vaccination was still under fourteen days.

Please don't listen to those anti-vaxers out there, nor should you trust your lives upon fringe-theory medicines - like the horse drug Ivermectin or those other wacko cures widely touted on social media. You must get the vaccines.

... and Marie has since tested positive for covid...
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Read more about the mishaps and mayhem of Nellie, The Ship's Cat