Covid cleared

This morning I drove to the site of the now closed Whitchurch Mental Hospital as it was called in my youth, to be swabbed for my covid PCR test at one of two Portacabins set up under a large canopy in the hospital car park. My only recollection of visiting the hospital was when I was a teenager, accompanying my father to visit his younger brother Douglas, diagnosed schizophrenic, and incarcerated here after going AWOL from army boot camp at Sennybridge near Brecon, and found wandering, out of his mind, on the moors nearby. He eventually died there of throat cancer, having been a chain smoker most of his life. If I visited anyone else there pastorally as a curate in nearby Caerphilly, I don't remember, but meeting Uncle Douglas just that once, sparked my interest in mental health and sickness, which in a way contributed to my seeking a life in ordained ministry.

As I had the postcode and name of the road where the site entrance is located, it was easy to find, I arrived ten minutes early and there was no queue of cars. The entire procedure took two minutes. On my way out, I stopped and took photos of the site entrance and the screening station to post on Google Maps. My proposed annotation identifying location in the hospital grounds wasn't accepted by Google Maps, but the photos of the site entrance showed clearly enough that this is where a stranger would be able to know they'd come to the right place.

Just eleven hours later, I had a text message on my phone stating that the test was, as expected, negative also stating that I didn't need to self-isolate. The message was clearly not customised to account for the fact that the test subject in question has pre-op self isolation as a condition for surgery to proceed. This is what the pre-surgery information leaflet specifies and is what I shall do. Reading the paragraph about this in the leaflet made me realise that clauses in the prescriptive sentence are written in the wrong logical order, leading to ambiguity. Some pre-surgery recipients of the text message could conclude that because their test result is negative they need not self-isolate, on the assumption that the most recent text supercedes the leaflet advice. I'm not happy about this, but to whom can I report this instance of a risk laden mixed message?

I'm staying home and not going anywhere until Friday morning so daily exercise means pacing around the house and garden. Before last November's operation I lowered my daily target by 20% to 10,000 steps, and managed this, and a little more. I didn't bother changing it today, and easily met my 12700 step target with pauses to take phone calls, eat meals, and prepare my Thursday Morning Prayer reflection for recording tomorrow. I found confinement pacing much easier today than I did last time, a tribute to the improvement brought about by the previous round of surgery. I think I'm going to enjoy instead of endure the next couple of days of waiting.