Today in the morning I had to do lateral flow covid test, which BTW was an antigen test. I was not aware LFT can be antigen tests when I made a post about how I went to collect it. I find it very difficult to use correct terminology when I don’t know what all the phrases mean. I guess antigen test tests for the presence of antigens but I am not entirely sure and also, what are antigens anyway?

I now feel like I’m spreading misinformation on my blog because I stated in that post that postal test is an antigen one and the other one I thought was just lateral flow test. Thank god I’m just a blogger. I’d never come to terms with making that mistake if I was a BBC journalist.

So anyway, when I was reading the test instruction, I found the above photo and first question that came to my mind was why would anyone represent children as shoes? I also started wondering why adult shoes have more decorative elements than children shoes.

There is this saying in English that you have to walk a mile in someone’s shoes to understand their experience so I couldn’t help but to try and apply that saying to this situation. I understand that doing a test on someone else requires us to put ourselves in other people shoes but I also realised that I wouldn’t be able to fit into a child shoes so it seemed to me that the instruction’s hidden meaning was that adults can’t do test on a child, even if we’re being told that we have to. I found it very distressing, and anyway, I’d think an average 10 years old should be able to do their own swab if explained by an adult how to do that.

I’m glad I started dealing with the test early in the morning because it did take me several minutes to work it all out and calm down.

Can you see those tiny triangles on the side of child’s shoes? You may need to enlarge the photo as they are really minute. I started wondering what they represent and it quickly came to my mind that there could be wings at the back of the child’s shoes. That would make sense: the shoes didn’t have any decorative elements at the front but they had wings at the back. I’m sure loads of children would love those.

So what I decided the instruction was saying was that: An adult needs to perform the test on a child. Yes, we know you can find it stressful but you really have do that this way because children are not very down to earth.

So this way everything become clear. I find it so distressing when instructions don’t make sense.

I now keep hoping that everything else will also make sense in the NHS.