March 26, 2020:  The Very First, the Ur-Ramification: My Favorite Sweater -

WAY back - when I had been self-quarantined for about nine days, and sick (surprise! I didn’t think I would get sick!) for about five days, and when I wasn’t even THINKING about coming out of the closet and admitting I had “possibly-mild COVID-19” to anybody but my very closest and most trusted - I faced the first Ramification quandary, which I will now share. (Spoiler – we came up with a “solution” that is probably dumb, but it exists, so don’t worry that you have to solve this one.)

A friend who had worked in a lab where exposure to radioactivity was a constant concern, had sent around an email detailing the containment and decontamination practices from said lab, and suggesting it might be a good model, especially in a family where one person had the virus and another – with any luck, not exposed - was in a high-risk population, say, nearly 70 years old.

I had lived for four truly miserable days or so in the guest room in my favorite sweater, which is a wool blend, maybe even partly alpaca, and which I now love with my whole heart because it went through those days with me, soaking up the radioactive fallout I was emitting, and giving me nothing but a hug in return.

I knew, after four days, that it was time for a shower and a change of clothes.

I had ramified far enough to make this plan: I needed to get my husband (then and now, healthy, as far as we know, yay!) out of my flight path. Then I needed (purell on the door handle etc.) to go from guest room to laundry room, throw everything I had worn into the washing machine, walk to bathroom naked. (I just gave you a visual you can never un-see, didn’t I? Haha. Sorry.)

Then I needed to shower, soaping profusely (a much-longed for consummation, by that point). Then I needed to go back to the washing machine with now radioactive towel, drop towel in machine, then back to guest room to put on clean clothes and then - back to bed! Hooray!)

Easy-peasy. Made perfect sense.

But the sweater! The SWEATER!

It is wool and I didn’t want to wash it on warm!

It is full of virus (calm down, I will get there) and I can’t put it in the dry-cleaning bag, which will then be radioactive.

And I can’t take it to the dry-cleaners because I am radioactive and should stay home and I feel horrible and don’t want to go anywhere.

And there probably aren’t any dry cleaners any more anyway.

And even if there are, if I take my sweater to that sweet refugee family at the dry cleaners, it would probably kill them off, just as we killed off the Native Americans with our smallpox-infested blankets.

(Pause for complete weepfest/breakdown over that historical horror. Dry eyes. Try to figure out where to put radioactive tear-infested tissue. Decide guest room trash is fine. Decide “radioactivity” is a pretty good analogy, but so is “smallpox-infected blankets,” in many ways.)

Still, where to put the SWEATER? Couldn’t put it on the floor by the washing machine because it might kill husband when he went to do his heroic basically-everything right now and unwittingly picked it up, and besides, it might get felted if he washed it, a fate Worse Than Death, apparently, in my eyes.

Realized Ramifications were going to be at least a part-time job for a while.

Ending:

Solution A –Somehow, (a la clowns in Volkswagen) get enormous sweater into one of those little zippered lingerie-bags and wash it on cold, carefully making sure it gets washed LONG enough without starting to FELT, god forbid. Scarlett O’Hara in the turnip field, declaring where she draws the line: As God is my witness, I shall not felt my favorite sweater!

Solution B – Discover that one of my circle “knows” the virus doesn’t like soft surfaces and in any case it lives only three days, tops, on surfaces, so put it in a paper bag, DATE the bag, and don’t deal with it for three days. (Bear in mind that this all happened more than a week ago, or in COVID-19 time, about three hundred years ago.)

Solution C – Honestly, never mind, we solved it.

I’m just tossing this First Ramification out there, to show the weird stuff that becomes a preoccupation all of a sudden when a sickie is trying to protect the rest of the family. Somehow, later that day, I thought that there was a black-humor slant on this, a “So You Think You Have COVID-19! A Handy Book of Tips for Handling The Uncertainty at Home!” self-help book aspect. That gave me something else to think about, which was good.