After avoiding the coronavirus for the last year-and-a-half without so much as an exposure to an infected person that I know of, I tested positive for COVID-19 last month.

Though I am fully vaccinated, and have been since April, I got sick at the end of August after my girlfriend, who’s also fully vaccinated, returned home feeling ill after a weekend trip with some friends. What started with just a light cough snowballed into an awful illness that left me constantly fighting for every breath and feeling so sick I could barely get out of bed. It was truly the sickest I have felt in my entire life.

Our bout with COVID-19 started on Monday, Aug. 23, when my girlfriend told me she was feeling sick after returning from her trip the night before. After leaving work early, I spent hours trying to track down a home rapid test to no success. Luckily, my dad managed to find one at an Ingles — the last one they had in stock.

I drove to his home in Jonesborough that night to pick up the test, contactless, and went home to test my girlfriend. I figured since she was already feeling sick, she would surely be positive if she had the coronavirus, but her test came back negative. Relieved, I went back to work Tuesday — double masked this time in case of a false negative — and gave her the second test as recommended later that night.

This time, it was positive.

Seeing the blue and pink lines indicating a positive result show up on the test was a pretty scary moment. I was worried my asthma would cause me to have a more severe illness if I got sick, but I took solace in the fact that I was fully vaccinated and trusted it would keep me safe — a well-placed trust, as I fully believe the vaccine is what kept me out of the hospital.

After reaching out to everyone we had contact with over the previous two days and urging them to quarantine and get tested, we made plans to both get tested at the Washington County Health Department the next day. At that point, I wasn’t feeling sick yet, and hoped my vaccine would keep me from having any symptoms if I was infected.

I can’t remember if it was Wednesday night or Thursday morning when I developed my cough, but it was a cough so light you’d normally just chalk it up to a tickle in your throat or maybe allergies. I wanted to believe it was just that, a cough, but I have reported on the pandemic long enough to know how unlikely that is, and knew better than to leave home while we waited for our results.