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Moving into a suburban area hundreds of miles from home, by yourself, to do a job with long, odd hours and random off days, pretty much guarantees that any friends you make will be at work. So it was for me when I arrived in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, in the fall of 2002.

I met the guy who would become my husband at the local newspaper; he was a 25-year-old news intern from Northeastern PA, and I, at 24, had been hired away (rescued?) from my first journalism job in the middle of Georgia to cover Philly-area sports.

We were polar opposites in terms of our personalities — I famously told one of our mutual friends, “I could never date that guy; he’s late for everything!” — so we definitely didn’t start out as “love interests.” But since we were part of a very small group of young transplants who didn’t have much to do outside the newsroom, we naturally ended up in the same loosely-connected social circle.

We started hanging out, just the two of us, for one reason: I had an extra ticket to a Cubs-Phillies game at Veterans Stadium, and someone told me that he, too, liked my team.

I scoffed when my therapist kept telling me, “It’s only a matter of time.” She had seen pretty much all her clients and family members, regardless of vaccination status, come down with COVID at some point over the past few years. But I could not even remember the last time I’d been truly sick, and having received all three shots plus being a staunch homebody who typically only leaves the house to go on nature hikes, I was confident in my immunity.

Maybe that’s why I felt so totally knocked on my ass this past week, when the virus finally did invade our house. We got exposed sometime around July 4; my husband hit the skids last weekend, and I followed a couple days behind.

I’ve known plenty of people who tested positive but escaped the symptoms; unfortunately, Hubby and I were not so lucky. In fact, I got slammed with COVID — fever, chills, heavy congestion, fatigue, the whole shebang — on the 21st day of my cycle, compounding the abject insanity/misery of PMS during perimenopause. As a result, I spent nearly all of Wednesday through Friday alternately coughing, crying — and, with help from NyQuil, napping — in bed.