Covid-19 has affected my life majorly over the past eight months that it has been around. It all started in the last month of school and everyone knew that school was getting shut down at some point. My cousin Jaidan and I would go and workout in the morning and go on a run after and I enjoyed it a lot. It made me feel great the rest of the day and it was great bonding time with him.

During the summer I worked at Sullivan supply with some classmates and others. That didn’t last too long because I got fired three days before I was going to be done for the summer. I’m pretty sure the boss of the warehouse is bi-polar and I should not have gotten fired. I was in the cardboard bin flattening boxes because I was done cleaning my ailes and he fired me at that moment and I know it was not from Covid-19 because the others were let go from work for school starting. I’m trying to go back because I didn’t do anything wrong and I made good money while I was there so I’m really hoping I can go back.

At my other job on the weekends I would work at the bar and wash dishes on saturday nights until ten p.m. Then on Sunday mornings I would go in at eight o’clock, prepare the kitchen for breakfast and then serve brunch until two p.m. Then on Saturday nights I would go in at five p.m and clean dishes until ten p.m or later if there were still orders to make, and then shut down and clean everything and be out by eleven. I made decent money for the time I worked there, eight dollars an hour. The bar ended up closing down a week or two into quarantine and I haven’t worked there since. I probably can’t go back because they have a lot of people on the work schedule and I don’t really think she’d want to fit me in.

My mom and dad are split so I stay with my mom in Dow City every week and every other weekend. Then I go to my dads every other weekend in Charter Oak. I was not able to go to his house for a while though because my dad's girlfriend was worried that I was going to bring Covid-19 into the household. She didn’t want me there too often because her mother had a stroke years back and different conditions. I didn’t go there for a solid month as I continued to live life somewhat quarantined during that time. About two months into quarantine I was able to go to my dads because they were fine with it and I told them that I felt fine. My dad had to convince his girlfriend, Sarah, that Covid-19 was not that serious. She never agreed with him that it wasn’t serious, they had a couple arguments over that but that’s when I started to go to their house every other weekend.

It was about  two months after school closed down along with everything else in the surrounding area that I was sick of staying away from everyone. I was convinced that Covid-19 wouldn’t affect me because statistics say it doesn’t affect kids in the teenage group who don’t smoke or anything, even if I got it so I decided to start to go hangout with friends and my cousins. I started going to Denison to Walmart and other places to eat with my mom and friends and didn’t get sick for a straight three months and felt great. I was taking zinc drops and putting them in my water and took other things to help my immune system so it could fight against covid if I came into contact with it. I would do workouts without weights all of quarantine like push-ups, crunches, squats, and would go on a run after all of that.

School started back up and I was very glad to be back because I was getting very bored of being home all day and not doing much since I’m not sixteen and can’t drive wherever I want yet. It was football season and I was very excited for it because I got to change my position to wide receiver. I was the backup quarterback my freshman year behind Gavin and I didn’t play much but I still put in a lot of work. But this year for football about three games into the season we played Coon Rapids Bayard. Jaidan and Trevor were the starting wide receiver and I was a back up wide receiver, but near the start of the second quarter, Jaidan got hurt and broke his collarbone. I had to go in for him and we ended up losing the game but I ended up having a decent game. I was still sad that jaidan got hurt because he is a very good friend of mine and also my first cousin. Jaidan never ended up coming back for football and our team didn’t do well by the end of the season, we also had multiple kids out with injuries. They were out from either not stretching and pulling or tearing something, I don’t remember anyone having Covid so we were good there.

Now basketball was right around the corner and I started to wear my mask daily again so I could lower my chances of getting sick with anything. It was a good thing that I did start wearing my mask because one of my friends, Petey, got Covid-19 shortly after. Multiple people got quarantined in my grade that were by Petey without a mask on but luckily I had just started wearing mine again. We were having shoot arounds and everyone was convinced that basketball was either getting cancelled or postponed for sure. As of right now that has not happened to high school basketball but junior high basketball has been cancelled. In my mind currently, I am just hoping that we can make it all the way through the season and we do well.

I’m pretty sure that I ended up getting Covid-19 about a week into shootarounds for basketball. I didn’t really have any bad symptoms except shortness of breath and honestly that was it. It might not have been Covid-19 but I was definitely still sick for a few days. So far I feel like I’ve normalized with how life has been lately and I haven’t really changed that much and I’m really just hoping that basketball continues and sometime soon things go back to normal so I don’t have to worry about not having fun with sports and friends and that’s all I want.