Thoughts on the Days Spent Alone
When I started writing this article, I had reached the 10th day (Sunday August 28th, 2022) of quarantining at home since first experiencing a fever, a common symptom of the ongoing COVID virus that’s currently in it’s seventh wave of peak in infection rates in Japan. Minus the first day where I experienced symptoms and went out to get tested, it had been a week and a half since I had last went out. Of course I was free to get some fresh air by stepping out to the balcony, but I hadn’t left my apartment in quite a few days.
Taking in the obscured view from my balcony on the 2nd floor, I felt as if I had missed the end of summer. Osaka just had a huge annual fireworks show that I guess had been put-off for the past few years due to the COVID pandemic. The temperature has cooled off to being comfortably warm at night and all the time I spent indoors made me realize that the nights have grown quite a bit shorter compared to the summer solstice and it felt like I’ve missed out on all the things happening in the world over the past 10 days.
I checked my work laptop earlier during the quarantine and in the afternoon of my last day of quarantine before I was scheduled to head back into the office on Monday Monday 29th, just as my quarantine is lifted. Of course, it didn’t look like much has happened with the team in my absence either. The fear of missing out on anything was mostly imaginary. But work didn’t matter to me as much as going back to practicing Aikido after all the days I’ve been off sealed away in my room. I even missed my dojo’s monthly seminar because I got sick with COVID just before it took place.
Being so involved with the dojo for most of my time in Japan, it’s become the central reason for my choosing to stay in Osaka. Instead of being open to re-locate anywhere else when I had to job hunt, I limited myself to Osaka because of my attachment and responsibilities to the dojo that I chose to take up. I put off any big travel plans that involved traveling any longer that a long weekend and most of my travels to neighboring prefectures or Tokyo revolved around some Aikido event. But seeing how things just went on fine with my absence for this whole time I’ve been quarantining, I felt relieved instead of stressed. Just considering the possibility of work or anything else affecting my ability to go to the dojo and miss even a day of practice before I had been compelled to stay home and quarantine caused me to feel stress and consider ways to make it so that I could get my way with Aikido schedules.
I’m fairly confident that the feeling of stress of being forced to show up very late or miss practice will come back, but the quarantine did give me time to just stop and think. Of course, I also spent a lot of time gaming to keep myself occupied, so there never really was a dull moment in the time I’ve been locked inside. But some say that feeling bored is also an important process to go through in letting the mind wander and start thinking.
If anything we all choose to keep ourselves entertained and distracted so we aren’t thinking and left alone with our thoughts. In retrospect, I think I could’ve done more to think on how I’ve been living my life and where I want to go with the luxury of ten days spent alone indoors, even if I was sick and not in the best state of health for a good part of it. But perhaps that’s something that will push me to do better as life returns to a semblance of normal for me again.
An Overview of How the Illness Went
Day 1, Thursday August 18th
The first day I developed recognizable symptoms was on a Thursday, where I got a fever that didn’t go down and I felt a fatigue that I hadn’t felt in years. I managed to push through to the end of the day working from home and taking things slow. My fever refusing to go down, I realized I needed to cool off another way and wrapped a wet towel with some ice cubes around my neck. I scheduled an appointment to get tested that night and by the afternoon, I wasn’t feeling too good. Once I got off work, I went to get tested and it felt awfully exhausting getting to the test site and home. I bought some medicine and food on the way back and called it a night after eating and showering.
Day 2, Friday August 19th
The next morning, it was Friday and I felt okay enough to work remotely despite the fever, after taking some over-the-counter fever-reducing pain relievers. But I decided to take the day off just in case since I was still waiting on my PCR test results, which would come out in the evening. I checked with work as well that morning and there wasn’t anything lined up, so I just applied to take the day off and let my workplace supervisor know that I’d tell them the test results once I found out.
The medicine I had from before was a very mild pain-reliever and didn’t really do anything to alleviate the symptoms I was experiencing, but fortunately the medicine I bought last night worked wonders. After an hour or so since taking the pills, I started sweating profusely for a few minutes and I checked my temperature to see it go back down to a normal range. I still felt tired, not in a sleepy way, but just moving around in the room, and even thinking too much just felt really draining.
Having taken the day off, I took some time to game and pass the time and then learn some coding. I still had a bit of time to wait before I found out on what I felt was most likely going to be a positive result for the PCR test. Expecting the worse, I called in ahead to the culture center where I teach a children’s Aikido class to ask them to cancel the upcoming class on Saturday.
In Want of Information
When it was night I scanned a QR code that would take me to the website that would post my test results, but it still wasn’t up. I waited some more and it was nearly 10 pm by the time I decided to check again. I tested positive. And that was the confirmation I needed to know I had caught COVID. But what’s next? I read some information linked to the test results page, but everything was in Japanese (which wasn’t an issue for me) and after scrolling through it, all that I really learned was to wait for a call from the hospital that would come the next day.
Having information available that’s easily understandable should be the main focus of notices in my opinion, especially when it’s for people who only know that they’ll have to quarantine for however many days after getting sick and nothing else. It was disappointing to see how most of the information was just about how the system is being overwhelmed by the number of sick people and nothing was really there about how I, the reader, should deal with the symptoms and what kind of registration/processing I should be doing or what specifically will be handled by the government while I wait.
My memories of the night are a little fuzzy since the medicine was wearing off and the fever suppressing was dissipating. The instructions for the medicine basically stated that it’s for waking hours, given the caffeine it contained and to take it only twice a day 6 hours apart. It was a little upsetting that whoever decided to write all the information up on the websites never seemed to consider how difficult it would be for someone who is tired and burning up to sift through a bunch of useless information trying to find out what they should be doing besides wait.
Seeing that there was an online examination in the links that offered people a chance to speak with a doctor for advice and get prescribed medicine, I signed up just with the hopes of getting more information later.
Not expecting to get any communications that late in the night, I started preparing myself for bed, and then a call suddenly came half past ten. It came from the testing site that I went to for the test and a staffer had called to tell me that they’re calling because I tested positive. Perhaps they had to call just to be sure I knew in the event I neglected to check the website.
My initial reaction was how thoughtless it was for them to call me that late at night, but I knew better and it was probably because that staffers are simply overwhelmed by the sheer number of calls they were obligated to make until they make contact with whoever they needed to reach, and that the fastest they were able to get to me was that late at night. Being told that I would be messaged with more information by the hospital tomorrow I went to bed and tried to sleep.
Day 3, Saturday August 20th
I was unable to sleep straight through the night. I thought I slept quite a while only to see I had awoken at midnight. Feeling hot, I had the shower on and I just sat in the bathtub to cool off and feed this desire to just submerge myself in water. When I emerged from the bathroom a cockroach had appeared in my room. It was the second time a cockroach had invaded my space in the month and after I dealt with it, I fell back asleep.
Sometime in the morning I received a text from the hospital telling me my HER-SYS number followed by another text some time giving me links to some information websites. Compared to the previous days I developed a regular cough and was occasionally hacking up small bits of phlegm.
Not even knowing what I was supposed to do with the HER-SYS number, I looked at the ministry of health website for information. Unfortunately the directions weren’t very clear and the url for the site that used the HER-SYS number seemed kinda suspicious in how long it was and how it contained words that read like nonsense, so I double checked with the qr code as well to make sure it wasn’t a phony site.
Once I was confident the site was legit, I went and registered an account using the HER-SYS number and saw their landing page that didn’t really make much sense to me. Was the hospital supposed to be entering the information, or me? I was pretty sure I read something along the lines of “for the medical institution” not “please enter your status” in the description.
It was in the afternoon when I finally got a follow up message from the hospital to enter a status report on the website where I used the HER-SYS assigned to me. There I entered my body temperature and selected some simple yes or no options to a short list of questions regarding symptoms. Another message just linked a number to call in case of emergency. And that was all, no real helpful information for me to use while I recovered at home and only information really that applied to people who think they may have been in close contact with infected individuals or for family members living with people in the family who are sick.
Anyways, I was running low on non-emergency-use food and had read about food distribution services for people and checked out the Osaka prefecture website for applying and signed up for it. I couldn’t go out to buy groceries if I was to follow the quarantine guidelines but I needed food and was grateful for whatever I could get. There was also a free rental service for oximeters that helped people track their oxygen levels at home. I applied for that as well.
The day ended uneventfully and I just passed the time gaming and learning to code until it was time to eat and then to go to bed. I still haven’t received a call for the online medical examination but I assumed they were busy and probably didn’t get to me yet. It was again later at night when I was getting ready to go to bed that I got a rushed call from whatever doctor got assigned to call me. I was quickly asked if I needed medicine and to just describe my symptoms. The medicine had already worn off so I was just listing things off the top of my head and was told I’d get some cold medicine to deal with the symptoms.
Day 4, Sunday August 21st
I woke up in the morning to the alert from the automated message from the hospital asking me to report my daily symptom statues. I was feeling better already even before the medicine kicked in and though my stuffy and runny nose still lingered and I was still coughing a lot. The best improvement I had was that my fever had gone down.
Later in the morning I received a call from the pharmacy of a chain drug store asking how I was and they proceeded to tell me that they’d be sending me medicine. It seemed a little late but better late than never.
I later got a call from the delivery service saying they’re here with the food and oximeter. The deliveryman said he needed to drop the box at my doorstep since it was supposed to be a no-contact delivery and the gates downstairs were closed. Fortunately someone had just passed through as during the call, so there was no need to figure out a way for him to come in the apartment building.
After waiting a few minutes to make sure the box was at my doorstep and the deliveryman had left, I opened my door and retrieved the expected packages waiting for me. When I opened the box my reaction was a mix of surprise and horror. Older images of food assistance showed instant ramen and other foodstuffs that seemed more fit to eat, but what was in the box were a meager pack of individually packed instant miso soup paste, 3 servings of precooked white rice, and a packet of vitamin enriched jelly drink.
The Osaka government website said they were running low on supplies and asked only those who were in the most need to apply for food assistance. I didn’t think it would be as bad as the picture of the actual package shown above, but that was the reality. I thought I’d better scrounge around some more to try and get me through the rest of the quarantine. I even looked at my city’s website for support and it was basically the same message. Too many sick people and low on supplies. Well just how many sick people living alone are there that the situation has gotten so bad? I don’t know but had to accept what seemed to be a food shortage that in no way encouraged people to follow the guidelines of staying home if they were well enough to make a food run.
With nothing else to do the rest of the day, I spent the remainder of the day learning to code and gaming again.
Day 5, Monday August 22nd
I woke up in the morning fine before the automated alert from the hospital asked me to input my daily status on the COVID tracking website and felt well enough to do work from home. I checked in with work at the end of the weekend via chat to see if there was anything I could do remotely, but there wasn’t. They had hoped to put me on a project in the office, but that was out of the question given my recovery was still in progress.
So, I was told to just take the day off. I still had enough paid leave days to cover the time I’d be taking off, and since there wasn’t anything urgent that required me to help out, I wasn’t causing anyone to put in extra work on the remote work end of the company to my knowledge.
I was expecting the medicine to get delivered to me today and later in the morning I did get the call from the delivery service saying that they’d arrived downstairs and needed me to come pick up the package. I thought it strange since the first delivery was pretty clear about no contact delivery, and it seemed like they either neglected to tell the deliveryman, or the guy just didn’t care. Anyways I was feeling better by the day and didn’t want to argue, so I put a mask on and disinfected my hands before going down and opening up the door downstairs to pick up the package.
The medicine was inside a small cardboard box and as I was heading up I got another call from the same delivery man saying there was another package, which surprised me in both the guy not knowing he had two packages for the same addressee and I having another package I do not recall ordering.
The second box was kind of big, but since it was addressed to me, I took it with me back to my room. When I opened it up, I saw the content was more food. It had to be a few days worth of food judging by the content volume. It contained more rice and miso soup paste, but thankfully also some chocolate bread and instant curry. There were some sports drink mixes and a box of tea leaves, but I wasn’t lacking on that end.
After examining the contents of the delivery I felt my outlook on the remaining days of quarantine looked a lot brighter. There was even a piece of paper that explained this would be the first delivery of more to come. And that what would follow would be frozen food, which sounded more exciting and delicious than instant curry that contained hardly any meat or veggies.
The medicine was pretty typical in form and content. A small slip of paper contained contact information for people that had questions or concerns for the pharmacy. The prescription for a weeks worth of drugs had labels for the names of the drugs, what each drug was supposed to help with, when and how much to take each time.
There was nothing unique about the capsule and tablet pills. I just had to stop taking over-the-counter medicine and switch to the more symptom specific drugs that I received. I wasn’t sure if it was the change in diet after I ran out of fresh food, if it was COVID, or if it was the over-the-counter medicine, but my stomach had begun to feel like there was some acid burning up. So I hoped the prescription drugs would have helped with my stomach situation, which hadn’t gotten to the point of causing discomfort, but did feel a little off.
Day 6, Tuesday August 23rd
Repeating the cycle of waking up in the morning and taking things slow, entering my status on the COVID health tracking website, and gaming/studying, nothing else really stood out on this day. I knew there would be frozen food coming but didn’t know what exactly, so when the call came, I went downstairs to wait for the deliveryman. He hadn’t even gotten out of his truck yet, but I guess with chilled items being delivered in the summer, it was best to be sure the addressee was actually available to receive the goods first before taking them out of the truck.
After receiving the box of frozen food, I went back to my room and hurried to unpack it and transfer the contents into my fridge. Frozen food hadn’t looked so appetizing in such a long time. There were some heat-and-eat toppings “Chinese” style sauce with meat and veggies to go with rice, frozen spaghetti, and packs of a frozen tray of food that featured a main dish and bite-sized side dishes.
In reality, my fridge is just a small cooler that could barely make ice cubes, so the frozen food was just packed in at around freezing temperature at best. And the instructions called for a microwave, which I had unfortunately gotten rid of because I rarely used the old thing I got from a recycle shop. Still, that didn’t stop me from attempting heating what I could in boiling water or just letting them warm up, still in the package, by setting them in a frying pan filled with hot water.
Still unsure of when I might get assigned some work I can do remotely, I checked in with my work supervisor to only get told to take the rest of the week off and asked if I could show up to the office Monday next week. Again, I had enough paid leave to cover the entirety of the week but it did not feel ideal to use them up when I was fit enough to do work remotely. I didn’t want to argue anyway. It seemed like a pretty gray zone thing to do to work while still sick with COVID, even from home. But President Joe Biden did that as President even when he got sick with COVID and two times as well when he tested positive again after being cleared to go back…
Days 7-10, Wednesday August 24th ~ Sunday August 28th
Aside from the daily reporting of my status onto the website, there didn’t seem to be much of anything else for me to do throughout the remainder of my time in quarantine. I’d been told to take the week off, but I couldn’t go out either if I was following the quarantine rules. There wasn’t any point in keeping in touch with my work supervisor outside of work any longer, except in emergencies, when there would be no work anyways, so Tuesday had been the end of my communications with work for the rest of my time in quarantine.
I had put in plenty of hours gaming and had studied coding as much as I could when I felt focused enough to progress along the self paced lessons. I even cleaned up my room a little by eating food that I had neglected to get around to eating or throwing them in the garbage. There was not much space to move around but I managed the bare minimum to at least get some exercise and active stretching done.
By the time I’d gotten my prescription drugs for the COVID symptoms, my condition had already improved. But I was still coughing quite a bit and it was the drugs that were doing their job of breaking down the phlegm so when I coughed I wasn’t hacking up any phlegm clogging up my throat and lungs.
The coughing remained relatively frequent until I woke up on Sunday August 28th when I felt as if it had mostly gone away. I had a family call later that morning, so it was a good thing too as I didn’t want my family to worry that I was still quite sick because of frequent coughing.
I had already been pushed by my brothers to get into coding to improve my career outlook and financial circumstances by opening up the potential of working better paying jobs. So it was a good way to please them by telling them I’d been putting in quite a bit of time learning to code while I was quarantining. My mom was concerned as well, but COVID has been going around the world and keeps coming back with different variations, so a lot of people already have caught the virus or at least know someone who did. In that respect my family already knew people that came out fine afterwards, and with my symptoms being on the mild side, there wasn’t any worry of my dying and I didn’t notice anything that would suggest I had some form of long COVID.
My thoughts of being able to go back out again soon had lifted my spirits, and my mom and my brother with planned a trip to visit me in October, were planning to stay on that schedule. Having removed myself from the outside world for so many days, I felt like it’d be okay to join them for a little bit more than just dinner and a chat at their hotel afterwards when they next come to Osaka.
Compared to Western countries, Japan had been slow to let in travellers, and limited the number of entries per day for non residents as well even though their borders were open to residents and citizens. My mom and my brother needed to apply for a visitor visa that required an invitation from someone residing in Japan, so I had been asked to check out some forms via email while I was recovering from COVID (thankfully their visas were approved later) .
Closing Thoughts on My Quarantine
Being unable to go out I asked someone else in my dojo’s organization to fill in for me on the last Saturday of my quarantine and apologized to the Sunday class, which had been off the week before due to the monthly seminar, that I’d have to take the day off since I was still quarantining.
Having taken care of all the communications that allowed for everyone else to just move on without me for the time was out minimized the problems that might have occurred as a result of my absence. In that respect I was free to enjoy the days off spent gaming and studying while basically living under unmonitored house arrest after I felt well enough to move about.
In terms of surviving being locked up at home, I was really saved by the food assistance and appreciated having the drugs for the symptoms. It was good that the government had just made it free to test in response to the ongoing wave of spike in infection rates, and that the food and drugs were provided and with the government bearing 100% of the costs. But then I’ve paid more than my fair share of taxes to deserve at least this much in return for my contributions deducted from my pay over the years.
When my quarantine ended, I was excited to finally go back out again and return to work. But I was wrong and ended up returning to disappointment… A story I will save for another time, if I tell it at all…
Thank you for reading to the end and I hope this long post has been an enjoyable read! Kindly share and like to support my blogging efforts!
One Chance Works 