Today I took my father to the hospital for six-week-long radiation therapy. From that, you can guess that he is not going there with a nasty cold. I do hope his prospects are good, the tumor is well defined and there are no signs of it metastasizing anywhere in the body. There are several problems though – his age, his heart, and his overweight. I won’t be particularly well-off, mentally, for the whole time probably.

But the genuinely good news is that my mother got today her first shot of the Pfizer vaccine and is scheduled for her second shot in three weeks. Our government seems to be slowly getting its act almost together at least on this issue and the vaccinations are starting to roll more than just a few people a week.

Another good news is that my sister has had Covid without even noticing it. She was tested due to an unrelated health problem and it was found that she has antibodies. She was a high-risk person (autoimmune disease, severely damaged lungs, asthma), and she had a really, really bad bout with the 2009 pandemic swine flu. She was isolating as much as possible and wearing a mask whenever she could, so probably she caught a very low dose of the virus – not so low as to not develop immunity, but low enough to not cause anything more severe than a runny nose for a few days.

So my worries are at least a bit alleviated with regard to two members of the family.