A stick in the nose

The clock was 09:00 and we got woken up by one of the watchmen who told us “it’s time to wake up”. We were all tired because we had the 12 to 4 watch and had only had about 5 hours of sleep, but we carried on and waddled to the big mess hall to sign some papers. These where the corona papers that the Portuguese government wanted us to sign. They wanted us to fill in our full name, passport number, phone number, birthdate and email. This was the preparations for the corona test we were going to take at the dock.

Before the test, the captain called us up for an assembly where he and the others explained how this would work. We would be sorted up by our ship number, I was lucky because I have the number 22 which meant I would be one of the first excluding the adult personnel, officers, DOS and captain who all have the numbers 1 to 11.

But going back to the test, they had two large containers sitting on the dock where we would take a temperature scan and samples from our noses and throats. It worked like this, we went up six at a time on to the dock and walked through the first container where our temperature was scanned to see if anyone had a fever. After the first container we walked over to the second one which was the scary one. Inside there were two people in large protective clothes who took the samples that they needed by sticking sticks up our noses and into our throats.

The line dissipated quickly, and my turn was just around the corner. I sat down and this guy came up to me and asked my name. They needed the names so that they knew which person the sample came from. The test went like this, first he took a large plastic stick with wool ends and put it a few centimeters up my nose canals. He put the sample in a plastic tube and continued by putting another plastic stick down my throat. He also put that in a plastic tube, and I was free to go. My nose felt weird after the test and my throat hurt a bit, but it was nice that the test was over. But the results wouldn´t come until the next day so we had to wait in suspense.

Much didn´t happen the rest of the day because we weren´t allowed to go ashore until our test results came in so we just chilled at the boat the rest of the day. I chose to watch some series while others either did the same, played games or studied. We also ate and we who were from seafarers’ line had one English lesson where we made a pod of a book, we have been reading but other than that nothing more of interesting happened. The End

William Seppi SJDM2023 23/11/2020