My Brush with Covid

We all have those times that we will never forget where we were. These are times that were burned into our memory. I remember vividly my wedding day, the days my children were born, and when my father died. Those that are old enough will remember Pearl Harbor, on 9/11 and many other very personal notable events. We can say the same when the lockdowns for Covid started. For me, that was March 18, 2020. Another Covid memorable Covid event occurred in the waning months of 2021, when my wife and I came down with Covid. We tested positive on Sunday, August 29, 2021. While it seems a lifetime ago, in reality, it has been less than six-months since my fourteen day brush with Covid.

I do not intend this story to be an arrogant recollection of my Covid experience. On the contrary, I am very blessed to have pulled through this experience with no lasting side effects. My experience was, mostly, typical. However, some former Covid sufferers might find my experience extraordinary, some even blasé. Consider this a part of a growing need to share what we experience. Everyone I’ve talked to had a unique experience with Covid. Some persons developed different symptoms, some suffered longer, and some suffered shorter. Many spent time in the hospital, and unfortunately many have died because of Covid.

In my former life as a pastor, one of the strongest emotions I dealt with was grief. Now, the definition of grief is not always the intense feelings when someone dies. Grief is more aptly defined as “anything that causes significant loss or life change.” Death is certainly a significant loss or life change, but so is divorce, job loss, a geographic move, a fire, or an accident. Grief is not always an enormous event. A significant loss can occur because your car keys are missing on the day a major work presentation is due. If your job is on the line, those missing keys could cause a job loss, which is a significant loss or life change. While grief is a natural part of our life and never completely goes away, we must process the grief properly, or it will never resolve itself. As a result, we will relive the significant loss, over and over, in a continuous loop, and there is nothing healthy about that.

So, what do we do about this significant loss and life change that Covid brought us? Well, without beating the proverbial dead horse, let’s talk about it. While Covid has affected all of us, our experiences have been different. So, let’s we write about it. For those of us that write regularly, know how cathartic writing can be. This exercise provides the opportunity to work through our memories and feelings. Writing about our personal and shared experiences provides a type of transference. From the mind and heart, through the fingers onto the page. I believe a book of our collective Covid experiences would provide fascinating insight into our collective suffering.

Now, permit me to begin my cathartic exercise in resolving my grief concerning my fourteen day experience with Covid.

As I recall, the week started normally enough. I live in less than a mile from the center of my small rural hometown. At that time, I was working three jobs, seven days a week. I would go to my full-time job as a substitute teacher at my daughter’s middle school, Monday-Friday from 8:00am-4:00pm, which is approximately ten minutes from our home. After school hours, my younger son would ride the bus from his elementary school to the middle school and we three would go home. When I worked my second part-time job at the YMCA during the weekdays, my schedule would be from 5:00pm-9:00pm. To my understanding, this is significant, because rarely do we venture far away from what is normal and familiar. Rarely do I need to travel far outside of my county for work or pleasure. The third job was inconsequential to my exposure to Covid because it is a fully remote freelance “ghost editor” position. Although that job would also suffer immense setbacks because of Covid as well.

School had been in session for a month and the YMCA after school care was in full swing. The Covid attrition rate was through the roof. There wasn’t a day that went by a middle school teacher wasn’t out because of a personal Covid illness or extended family member. The YMCA wasn’t much better with weekly phone calls to parents about likely exposure to Covid. In contrast, my wife works in a small warehouse company of 10 employees with only three people in the enclosed office. They did not expose her to where she needed isolation or quarantine.

My wife and I were excited, but baffled by how we had so far escaped illness. Our 12-year-old daughter had one experience with an exposure, but all she suffered was boredom from school. My nine-year-old son and 70-year-old mother have yet to be exposed to Covid with the need for isolation or quarantine, for which I am grateful. Yet, the rest of my family, six people total from two different counties, took ill the week of Christmas 2020. We celebrated our family Christmas the following year on Valentine’s Day 2021.

If you have pieced the puzzle together, I think you can see that I was the weak link. Even though both my children and I attended school daily, I took ill first. Was this because of work at the YMCA? That answer is unknown, but “Once you eliminate the impossible, whatever remains, no matter how improbable, must be the truth.” (Sir Arthur Conan Doyle) So, I believe I took ill from my exposure to someone at the YMCA.

When I went to work the week of August 22nd, I was extremely tired. Working three jobs and then running a household is exhausting business. Many of you can relate to that exhaustion. But that week was different. I was a different kind of tired. I reflect on that exhaustion now and it could have been a precursor of what was to come. The misery set in on Thursday, August 26th, with chills unlike anything I ever experienced. The YMCA was always very cool anyway, so I dismissed them as a result of the air conditioning. Once I got home, I went straight to bed, shivering.

I struggled through the next day at school and at the YMCA. However, by 7:30pm I was all but done. I was extremely tired, had little appetite, and cold. This was a bone numbing chill that forced me to wear a jacket inside. After 8:30pm, all I did was count the minutes before closing. At 9:00pm, I bolted like a rabbit to my truck and home. I climbed into bed with long pajamas and three blankets over me. And yet, my temperature in those first two days never went above 99.4 degrees.

At the time, we weren’t sure what it was. Was I just exhausted? Was it the flu? We couldn’t tell if it was Covid, but only suspicions. I struggled to find a Covid test I didn’t have to wait four days to take. I was out of luck. There wasn’t a hospital or pharmacy within an hour’s drive that had a Covid test in stock or an open schedule. I finally found some BinaxNow tests online through Kroger and ordered one (silly me), but I still had to wait four days for it to arrive.

That was the frustrating part, the waiting. I needed to tell my work and school I was positive for Covid. As we waited for the tests, the symptoms got worse. I didn’t rest very well. I could sleep for hours, but it didn’t help. I would get up, shower, nibble on something, and fall asleep in my blue wing-back chair. Ultimately, I rested better in that chair than I did in the bed. While my sleep wasn’t restless, I had the same dreams repeatedly. To put a humorous spin on it, I dreamed about Longmire episodes. I don’t remember what they were about, but it was the same for several days. While I have a family history of having strange dreams, this was way beyond strange. Perhaps the worst part of my Covid experience was the nausea. I could deal with the lack of rest, the weird dreams, the disturbing feelings, but the nausea was awful! It was worse than being tired. It was always there. If I ate it was there, if I didn’t, my hunger made it worse. Needless to say, but I threw up several times in those two weeks. To be honest, it was a relief.

By late Saturday afternoon, Marie, my wife, had developed the same symptoms. After a quick but detailed interrogation of our children, they were perfectly normal. And for the duration of the next two weeks, they did not develop any symptoms. For the next two weeks, the kids stayed in their respective rooms and we kept our distance and contact to a minimum.

The testing kits I ordered Thursday arrived Sunday afternoon. The scene around the kitchen table was akin to a biblical judgment, with much weeping and gnashing of teeth. My nine-year-old son was especially beside himself, very concerned that we were going to die. In hindsight, it was a ludicrous reaction, but that very week two people we knew had become seriously ill. Since Marie and I were the only ones showing any symptoms, we took the tests. The instructions stated it would take 15 minutes for the results to appear. Ours came back in six minutes!

I cannot say that we weren’t concerned about dying, but the thought crossed our minds more than once. Just read my articles entitled, I Had a Stroke. I’ve had my brush with death and/or disability, but this was different somehow. I ran through multiple scenarios of who my children would live with if Marie and I died. It was an unnerving feeling to have those thoughts run through my head. This cycle of symptoms and feelings continued for the next 8-10 days.

We developed a routine that bordered on normalcy. We woke up at a reasonable hour for sick people, showered, changed clothes, took our Covid vitamins/medicine, and ate something. After four days, it was a fruitless gesture for me to eat. Earlier I said I was constantly nauseous, but now Marie and I were olfactorily (smell) and gustatorily (taste) challenged. That is a fancy way of saying we could neither taste nor smell. For several weeks after, I had to ask my daughter if something had spoiled in the refrigerator. You know, that last bit of lunch meat or dribble of milk. I couldn’t tell. How ironic would it have been if I contracted botulism or E. coli from spoiled food, after recovering from Covid?! Some flavors haven’t returned, like my once favorite snack food, pretzels, still taste funny. My smell has never been that sensitive, so no actual loss there.

Since the kids were in school, they had to go virtual. And in order to go back to school, they had to test negatively for Covid as well. As with everyone in the country dealing with Covid differently, our small SE GA coastal county hasn’t been virtual since May 2020. The county went hybrid per parent choice during the 2020-2021 school, which was absolutely crazy with schedule changes and meals in classrooms, 8th graders in 6th grade classrooms, limited bathroom access, and tons more! So, in reality, for my kids to be at home for a couple of weeks was very unusual, and boring.

Now, getting back to the hospital testing. That was an ordeal unto itself. Scheduling the test at the local hospital wasn’t that bad, but filling out the paperwork to schedule the test was brutal. We would have to wait 10 days to get tested. When we finally got the chance to test after 10 days, my son asked, “Are you going to touch my brain?” The nurse performing the tests laughed good-naturedly because that hadn’t been the case. In fact, our hospital testing experience was very gentle, and the results were back within 48 hours. All of us tested negative and would go back to work and school the next week.

Despite our difficulties, the experience was about average. It is nothing I care to experience again. And as I get older, I realize how difficult it will be to recover from a serious illness. We had some help with medicine, food, and a finger-tip O2 monitor. As everyone is aware, the O2 levels are an important recovery factor and an indicator of a serious illness. While the cough lingered for some weeks after, our O2 levels never dropped below 95%.

As strange as it may seem, two days after our tests result came back negative, exactly two weeks after my first symptoms, I felt normal. Almost as if nothing had happened. Unfortunately, the aftermath of those two weeks included lost wages, extra bills, and the death of two more of our community members.

I don’t recall what was happening outside of our house for those fourteen days. Our family called us, our pastor brought some food visited with us a bit. He shared his struggles with the illness and his concern for us. We didn’t invite him inside because the risk was too great. Besides, his brother was the one who was seriously ill and ultimately died. It was hard that he was helping us and we couldn’t comfort him. In all situations like this, it was wholly unfair. I won’t forget that.

The fallout of our fourteen day Covid experience was minimal. While we missed work, we’ve overcome the difficulties. The kids went back to school, making up their missed assignments along the way. It seems strange, but those two weeks became a hole we filled in pretty well. However, I know there are many other people who will never have that chance. I wish I had been more active during those days. I think I might have recovered faster or felt better if I had. I could have raked leaves, cleaned my garage, organized my workshop. I would feel better now if I had used that time more effectively, but that is a lesson learned in hindsight.

For what it is worth, this was my 14 day experience with Covid. If you made it this far, thank you for reading. At the very least, I hope it provided the catalyst necessary to work through your own grief caused by this shared Covid experience.

Grace & Peace!