Elective: Week 6

Here we are! Week six! The final week! (surely?) Well. Presumably everyone reading this knows how this ends, since I spoke to you at the time/in the weeks shortly after. But if not, then buckle up for how things actually went. Before we start, I'd like you, dear reader, to think back to this link I shared in the week 3 entry of this blog, and try not to laugh at me too much.

I had a mostly uneventful weekend, which consisted of going shopping at Balexert, and going bouldering (for the first time since lockdown started! I am very unfit!) somewhere just across the border in France. After all the excitement of the previous week, it was a soothing balm to get up to nothing in particular. I bought my final abonnement hebdomadaire (weekly ticket, come on now I've not really gone native) for the tram, and started the final week thinking about how I could round off my project here as best as possible.

I spent Monday in contact with the MSc student who had previously been working on The Project, and decided I was going to reproduce her results, to see if I'd been on largely the right track. After some explanation of what she'd done, I managed to make an uneasy, but qualitatively identical fit to her simulated results. Some very hacky programming and head-scratching convinced me that we had effectively done the same thing. Phew. So I set about putting these into an exciting PowerPoint to present to my team at the end of the week.

Throughout this, I was feeling achey and tired - a result, I assumed of the bouldering. So when I woke up on Tuesday, still feeling tired and achey, I thought wow I am unfit and went about my day. Also, strangely, coffee had become deeply unappetising to me. Very peculiar. Anyway.

On Tuesday we finally began moving the physical part of the experiment to its new home in our lab. This meant some heavy lifting of equipment onto trolleys and shifting them into lifts and down long corridors. I was feeling awfully tired.

Whole stack o' nerd stuff

After some heavy lifting and a light lunch, I'd developed a headache and was feeling slightly shivery, so I decided I needed to take the rest of the afternoon off. Lina was sort of sympathetic when I told her...

My adoptive apartment usually had people round to watch the Great British Bake Off and, this being Tuesday, we were expecting people. I felt like a massive killjoy when I suggested as my usual over-cautious self that perhaps it wasn't a good idea to have people over, just in case this was Covid. My flatmates agreed and cancelled having people over last minute.

Things hadn't improved by Wednesday, and I woke up feeling definitely ill, after not being able to sleep most of the night with a headache and a fever. I decided I was going to get a Covid test, which was supposed to be funded by the FOPH for anyone with symptoms. The rest of the day was spent in bed, and I'd now taken to wearing a mask when entering public spaces in the flat (I mean the toilet).

By Thursday I felt mostly better, and with the assistance of paracetamol didn't feel ill at all. No way I could have Covid now right? "I'd got over it in 36 hours, this was obviously just a cold", I thought to myself, naïvely. The testing centre involved being asked lots of questions in French about my health, and feeling certain that I was going to get coronavirus from the thirty or so other symptomatic people in the room. I then had to answer questions about my health insurance status, again, in French. Besides my political views on insurance-based healthcare "systems" (negative), this was also an eye-opener into what a massive waste of time having insurance handlers in hospitals is, and how it keeps out people who are in unusual or precarious situations (i.e. those of no fixed address, non-native speakers of the language). 

A nurse deftly shoved a swab up my nose, and explained to me in French that I didn't need to have my tonsils swabbed because "we don't do that any more". I returned home and thoroughly washed all my clothes and had a shower, awaiting the text which would tell me I could still fly home two days later. I was half right: the text came.

Oh

What followed was some of the least productive days' work I've ever had, confined to a small room, otherwise wearing a face mask if I wanted to go to the toilet. The view from my bedroom was great, don't get me wrong, but you can get tired of the Jura when it's all you're allowed to see. Thanks to all of you who stayed in touch with me over those mostly very dull days spent speculating about whether the chest pains I was experiencing were worry, some other Covid symptom, or the onset of long Covid. I am happy to announce that they were not the third option, though unsure between the first two. 

Rate my WFH setup

I also kept myself busy with an awful lot of phonecalls to the médecin cantonal, trying to track down my elusive SwissCovid app code, and the CERN Covid Services hotline, who seemed to be making up the rules as they went along and extending my exclusion from CERN site indefinitely. Made all the more ridiculous by the fact that at this point I was no longer entitled to CERN site access.

Pro tip, don't call CERN Covid Services, it's a premium rate number, I discovered when my bill arrived

Despite all this, I never got the code, making the Covid tracing app I'd downloaded completely pointless. I was genuinely disappointed by this, thinking this was exactly the kind of thing that Switzerland should be getting right. Conversely, CERN sent all (5) of my close contacts from the four days prior to my getting ill to be tested, and they all came back negative. It seems my religious handwashing was worth something in the end, as I had apparently not spread the virus to anyone else.

After all this self-isolation, I had one day of freedom cycling around Geneva, then was allowed to fly home to 14 further days of quarantine, despite being maybe immune to Covid, at least for the next few months...

Meyrin from the air

Alexa, play the Eastenders theme tune

Now for the reflections which precisely no one asked for. While it's a shame that the elective ended like it did, on the whole, I had a fantastic time. I met some really interesting people, and experienced what felt like an oasis in the middle of heavily coronavirus-restricted Britain. Obviously, I paid the price for that. For now, I will say that it was worth it, even though it's effectively set me back three weeks at work (I am not much of a home worker). Due to pandemic restrictions, I wasn't able to access very much of CERN, which was a shame, but the experiment was still incredibly interesting. I also very much enjoyed living in the mountains, and getting to know Geneva and some amount of the rest of Switzerland. On the whole, I'm very glad that I managed to get through all the organisational hurdles and make it out there, despite everything. On top of this, I am incredibly lucky to know so many people living in Geneva who let me steal their friends, stay in their flats, and take me on fun excursions for a few weeks, so special credit to Meirin, Savannah, Adam and Luke for this one.