All I got for Christmas was COVID, but I was one of the lucky ones

It was our second Christmas spent in isolation after a walk along Manly beach in December 2020 prompting a quick 12-hour dash home before the borders shut.

A few years ago, a stint in intensive care with "severe respiratory distress" due a "rare" condition has left me reaching for the asthma meds and prednisolone when I get a simple cold, so I thought COVID would be rough for me.

I was wrong. Perhaps it was because I had only had my second AstraZeneca shot four weeks before COVID paid me a visit.

With so much COVID in our community and so many people likely to test positive in coming days, I have been asked to share my story in the hope it helps to quell some of the fear but also shed some light on how easily it can spread among young people.

I know not everyone will have it as easy as us. I know some who have done it tough and been hit for six, but I hope my story will help to reduce the stigma for those who test positive to COVID.

I have elderly parents and loved ones with serious comorbidities that I know I need to protect. By sheer luck, and some COVID-safe measures, when we did finally get to take our kids to see their grandparents that lockdowns had prevented us from doing all year, our youngest child didn't pass COVID to them.

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When we left Warrnambool on a family holiday, unknowingly taking COVID with us, we met our elderly parents outdoors and even opted not to stay with them like we normally would.

My eight-year-old, who we think brought it to our family, was probably not infectious then but we will never know - he was asymptomatic and never really got sick at all.

A socially distanced holiday climbing mountains and swimming at the beach meant there was no contact tracing to be done when our youngest was flagged as a close contact and we all eventually tested positive.

The timing of first testing negative, and then positive test days later, meant we weren't infectious in the Warrnambool community. We spent our wedding anniversary getting a COVID test together.

From what I've been told by others in my "cluster", it was the Delta variant that paid us a visit at Christmas.

For me it was a runny, blocked nose and slight cough for two days. In fact, I probably would have mistaken it for hay fever, which for me is much worse than COVID was.

My husband was slightly worse, but he still managed to rock up to his home office and work long hours on each day.

My four children - aged between eight and 15 - all tested positive. The most surprising thing for me was that I would never have known they had it, and I would have packed them off to school if they hadn't already finished for the year.

My youngest had a temperature of 38.5 one night - something we only checked because we knew by then he had COVID. He demanded a retest saying: "I'm not sick. I'm not going to die".

Of the other three, one was completely asymptomatic, the other two just had a headache for a day and were a bit tired.

Some of us did lose our sense of smell, but it came back after a few days.

In hindsight, we were lucky to get COVID when we did - no long waits for testing, free RAT tests handed to us, and almost daily phone calls from the health team to check on our welfare (although by the time the positive results came through we were already on the mend).

And as one of my friends, who also got COVID, said to me: "The fear is gone".

The silver lining for us was seeing the Christmas spirit like we have never experienced before.

Waiting for the full three months to get our AZ meant we were locked out of Warrnambool's vaccinated economy for a few weeks which also meant we hadn't done all our Christmas shopping.

Thanks to the kindness of local businesses and friends dropping us meals, toys and gifts, my youngest had something to unwrap on Christmas Day.