B & W Workshops 2 & 3 – Covid Delays

On the Saturday evening before our Monday workshop to develop our own black and white films and then create prints from the negatives, I felt really unwell. I’d gone to bed as usual and kept awakening in the night with a massive headache and a sore neck.

In the morning of Sunday I was still super knackered, I had a sore neck, splitting headache and didn’t want to eat, drink or look at any screens, which was the most unusual symptom.

So ill did I feel that I remained in bed all day sunday and had to send an email to university that I wasn’t well enough to go in and start learning the processes required to create our own black and white images. My work are flexible at me going into university as long as I make up the hours but as I thought it would be a big day of learning I had booked a holiday and planned to stay all day producing some prints.

Monday came and in the evening my wife persuaded me to go for a PCR test and the lateral flow tests I’d done up until that point were all negative so I figured it might be something else. That something else was chemical poisoning. No not my wife or family hiding some arsenic in my mashed potato but the Saturday evening I was trying to retrieve the leader from a couple of canisters of B&W film using the wet bit of film through the slit in the canister trick.

My short video of retrieving the leader.

The first time I dampened the spare film negative strip I’d wet it with water but when it dried up I just absentmindedly licked the film, forgetting that it was treated with some chemistry in the colour film processing machine at Jessops. I did this a couple of times and got the leaders out of the two films and thought nothing of it.

When I thought I’d poisoned myself I spent a little time looking through the COSHH data for the chemistry used in the photographic process, that made it worse and I felt sure I was a gonner.

Wednesday morning, I had a text message from the Gov.UK that informed me that my PCR Test was positive, I did a lateral flow after this and it too came up positive. The first time in fact that I’d ever seen a positive result on a Lateral Flow test.

My Positive Lateral Flow Test

My isolation for ten days meant that I’d be missing the next Monday university workshop and I was gutted again that I’d be two weeks behind everyone else. The lecturer was kind enough to wish me better health and I figured that it’s for the right reasons so I hung on in there and started feeling a bit better on the Wednesday before my isolation finished.

The Friday after my positive PCR (Polymerase Chain Reaction) test was also making me sad as it was the release date of Ghostbusters: Afterlife so it meant I couldn’t go to that too. Rest assured that I’ve made it back there now and seen it twice on my Unlimited card.

Me and all my friends going to the cinema after my isolation completed

University were excellent at accepting my illness and upon my return for Workshop #4 Matt gave me some very useful support to get my film developed and then a tour of the B&W Darkroom.

My work were also very understanding of me being ill and checked up on me at regular intervals to make sure I was getting better. Working from home means that I can work during isolation if necessary as nobody is at risk from my contagious disease over a Teams link.

Since I’ve been allowed to mix again I’ve also had a couple of Antibody Test kits sent through where you have to hold your hand in a bowl of warm water for two minutes and do jumping jacks to get the blood flowing before using a lancet to prick your finger. The pierced part of your finger then allows you to bleed into a small test tube that must be sent in to see how many antibodies you had at the start and how many after two weeks clear. Milking my finger for blood was a nightmare the first time but the second time it was like Old Faithful in Yellowstone. Blood was all the way to the top of the tube and all over the box that the tube was positioned in. Hopefully the research that they do with these samples will yield some helpful information or a clone army of Bob Griffiths’ walking around being idiots.

It’s weird to think that I’ve now had SarsCoV2 or Covid19 in my body, I’d had both of my jabs (AZ) before catching the illness and still felt rubbish so I dread to think how bad I may have been without the vaccination programme. At the time of writing this , I’ve also just had my booster (Pfizer) and have suffered no real ill effects of that so here’s hoping that I dodge the Omicron variant heading this way.

The real heroes of this story though, apart from NHS helping vaccinate the UK, are my family who managed to look after me without picking the infection up themselves. I’m forever grateful that they kept me supplied with drinks (when I wanted them) and offers of blankets..

Hopefully, reader, you’ll not have suffered from Covid and I wish you all the very best of health for the future. Let’s hope this “one thing and another” soon does one so we can be free once more.

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