Imagine my surprise when I opened the door to the dental clinic and saw that no one was wearing a mask. Not the two patients in the waiting room and not the three staffers behind the counter.
“We don’t have to wear masks?” I asked the receptionist.
She shook her head.
I was overdue for a cleaning because I’d been absent since the start of the pandemic. I probably should have walked out. But I stayed since I was fully vaccinated. And I really like my dentist since she is not stingy with Novocain, and I’ve never had a problem with the work she’s done on my original chompers.
The hygienist was new; she was filling in for the regular hygienist, who was on maternity leave. It took about 40 minutes for the X-rays and cleaning, and the sub wore a mask.
Six days later, I got the first symptoms of COVID-19 — a feeling like I wasn’t myself, and the lightheadedness and weakness that come before the flu.
On the morning of the seventh day, an eye ache prevented me from reading the newspaper, and I had a fever of 102 degrees.
On the eighth day, I still had a fever and eye pain, and I couldn’t breathe through my nose because I was so congested.
Can’t be COVID-19, I thought, since I had both Pfizer doses. Maybe it was just an allergy.
On the ninth day after my dental appointment, I pulled up to the drive-thru pharmacy window at CVS for a free COVID-19 test.
The good news: The test was more comfortable than those from the early days, when they would push the extra-long Q-tip up your nose till you feared it might pierce your brain. The kind pharmacist at CVS let me insert a smaller Q-tip and said I did not have to swab deeply.
The bad news: The text from CVS the next morning was all in red, with the word “Positive” in bold. It recommended that I contact my doctor, who replied that Regeneron was unnecessary since my vaccination provided plenty of antibodies. That was also why my symptoms were relatively mild.
I also called my dentist. Not to accuse, since I couldn’t be certain her office was the source. But I did explain I got the disease six days after my appointment, and hadn’t had contact with anyone else in the interim. She has since made masks mandatory at her clinic, along with temperature readings.
On the 10th day, my fever broke. But congestion persisted, robbing me of my sense of smell and taste.
Per Centers for Disease Control and Prevention guidance, after testing positive, you should quarantine for at least 10 days after the first symptoms appear. At the end of that time, if symptoms have diminished and you’ve been fever-free for three or more days, you can return to normal, which I was able to do.
Since I still could not taste or smell, however, I initiated “smell training,” a therapy my doctor suggested. It entails sniffing four aromas twice a day, so every morning, I set out peanut butter, coffee, pickles and horseradish.
I couldn’t smell any of them the first two days of training. The third day: Voila! I caught a whiff of sweetness from the peanut butter. Then the salty, sour but refreshing scent of the pickles. The coffee and horseradish were slightly perceptible that evening, and my smell and taste buds improved day by day. My doctor said I could speed up the process with the purchase of an over-the-counter nasal spray, which I planned to get.
As I type this, I’ve recovered approximately 60% of my smell and taste and ought to be a happy camper, were it not for the fact that I infected my wife, Marianne, which we learned was all but inevitable.
It took her longer to shake the fever, but so far, she has retained her sense of smell and taste.
Twenty-five days past my dental appointment, we both still have a slight cough.
According to the CDC, the odds of getting breakthrough infections like ours, which happen to people in spite of being fully vaccinated, are between 5,000 and 10,000 to 1.
Those odds, coupled with the fact that my wife and I are both in good physical condition with healthy diets and 10 hours of vigorous exercise per week, underscore the strength and perniciousness of the delta variant.
She and I are over 65, so the consequences could have been dire had we not been vaccinated. But that’s a hypothetical with no wheels, since we get our information and news from reputable sources and not from demagogues or emails forwarded by conspiracy theorists.
Early this month, I watched the broadcast of the NFL season opener between the Dallas Cowboys and the Tampa Bay Buccaneers at Raymond James Stadium in Tampa. Sixty-five thousand people were packed together, most without masks, either because they were vaccinated or thought that the worst of the pandemic was over.
Clearly, it is not.
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ABOUT THE WRITER
David McGrath is an emeritus English professor at College of DuPage and author of “South Siders.”
