Mitchell, SD—For virtually every person, the test for Covid-19 is ranges from mildly unpleasant to 10-second torture. Not Bill Fletcher.
The auto mechanic and volunteer podiatrist really enjoys repeated nasal swabbing. Fletcher, who has not had a positive result in any of his 26 tests, said he was apprehensive at first to be examined.
“I thought it would be awful,” he said. “I went with (wife) Justine the first time and I was trying to be strong for her but inside I was sweating, big time. Then that swab got up in there and…I just…like a whole new world of pleasure opened up to me.”
Fletcher returned three days later to the Sanford Medical Center parking lot in Mitchell for a second test. And came back the next day for this third, and later that afternoon for his fourth. After six tests in eight days, Fletcher became the first, and so far only, person to be banned from the facility.
“He’d bring different cars, wear a ski mask, he even tried a Russian accent, though he sounded more German,” Nurse Amber Dillon said. “I thought he was just a hypochondriac, but then I start administering the test and he says, ‘Oh, baby, not so fast,’ and I’m like what the [expletive deleted]. It made me want to go back to working as a rat catcher.”
Fletcher has now been banned from testing facilities in Rapid City, Sioux Falls, Brookings, and the alley behind the massage parlor in Wall Drug.
“Not sure that last one was legit,” Fletcher admits.
Unable to get his fix, Fletcher has been self-examining, or “testerbating” as doctors call it, several times a day.
“Sometimes it’s one nostril, sometimes its two. Sometimes I put the swabs in my mouth to make my nose so jealous it begs for it,” Fletcher said. He continued but this reporter had backed too far away by that point to hear what he was saying.
Justine Fletcher, who has only tested the one time, declined to be interviewed for this story, but she did recently post on Facebook, “I always feared my husband would cheat on me with another woman, but a Q-Tip?”
She added that she is now having an extra-marital affair with a roll of gauze.