I am not sick…

My host just told me, “bad news, I just tested positive for COVID-19, I’m pretty sure you gave it to me. I never cough and I’ve been coughing a lot.” The reasoning is I’ve been coughing a bit but I know my body and it is definitely allergies to something in the air. It is possibly a combination as he said but if I had any sense that my cough had anything to do with anything that was making me sick other than the usual way I sometimes have little respiratory flare ups from something in the air I would have tested or worn a mask. I am almost certain I did not have COVID-19 again but there is no convincing anyone else of that especially when they have never had COVID before and they do not know my body. It does feel really bad to feel accused of getting someone sick (though he says he doesn’t blame me, stuff happens, I *would* feel responsible if I had a sense that what was going on was me being sick and doing nothing about it. Then these are things remind me how vulnerable I still am in some ways: he gets sick with COVID-19, I get blamed and maybe resented, feel less welcome once again for something that really and truly isn’t my fault or my responsibility, but there is really no way to prove that, so what, I just keep feeling guilty for stuff that’s not my fault and end up feeling bad for all the kindness that was offered to me? Plus feeling bad and guilty that someone I am living with is sick and thinks I am likely the origin of that. It makes perfect sense why he would think that but he never raised any concern about that when I was coughing a lot (off and on, just like allergy flare ups). And I’ll probably start coughing again because the source of the allergies hasn’t gone away.

He accepted then my assessment that it was allergies but now thinks it was COVID and there’s nothing I can really say to that. Just, let me know if you need anything or there is something I can pick up for you. I wish he would have raised a concern then, I could have tested and showed him it was not COVID (though it is possible that it was, I really think he contracted it from somewhere else) but at this point even though I just tested negative it could just be that I am getting over it and no longer contagious so yeah I can’t prove anything but I didn’t expect to be ‘blamed’, or for him to get COVID. I wish I had tested when I was coughing more… now I feel like I should have done more but I had no reason at all to suspect that I had COVID. I hate that the world has become a place where coughing for any reason becomes so suspicious.

So anyway it’s really uncomfortable for me. The environment at the shelter was awful, I felt blamed there too and not just for having COVID but for actually testing despite half the people there having a cough and thus making it an issue: you tested and now everyone’s going to want to get tested. Well, that would be a good thing, to test everyone, as it’s probably floating around everywhere at that place, but they don’t want to deal with the consequences of it so they’d rather keep it hidden… and when I decided to test I felt like some people then felt like they had l the right to blame me for every cough in the whole place, even though I was the only person there who wore a mask at the first sign of being at all sick. I don’t know, I don’t want to deal with feeling bad about stuff I have no reason to feel bad about and i feel bad he’s feeling bad and don’t want to complicate that with feelings of guilt but I’m going to have them anyway…