On Living with a Case of Corona Virus.

I spent the weekend after I was tested in bed. I felt exhausted and sore. My chest hurt and my heart raced at random intervals. I missed going outside. I paid for the last season of Schitt's Creek on Amazon to give me something delightful to watch while I started a new sweater knitting project and tried to keep my mind off how lousy I felt.

On Sunday, the clinic where Nephi had been tested called with his results: negative. Given how sick he'd been, how sick I was, and how he'd already tested negative for influenza A and B, we were surprised. The clinic couldn't explain why his results had take 12 days to come back. That's something we still wonder about.

On Monday morning, a nurse from IHC called to tell me my results: I had tested positive. She told me to stay in bed, monitor my symptoms, stay hydrated, and not leave the house until at least seven days had passed since my symptoms began and 72 hours passed with no fever. It was a bummer, but at least I finally had a definitive answer.

A few hours a later, a guy named Pete from the Salt Lake County Health Department called. His objective was to gather information about who was living in the house, who had visited recently, where we all go to work and school, whether or not we were staying quarantined (it sounded like he couldn't really force us to stay home, just frantically advise us to), and where we might have been exposed to the virus. He asked multiple questions trying to understand where we'd contracted it. Do we work with people who traveled to Asia or Europe? Do we know anyone else who has it? He asked these questions a dozen different ways. I gave him all the information I could think of, as well as the phone numbers of those we might have had contact with while contagious, but the fact is that we just don't know how we caught it. The more question he asked, the more hapless Pete sounded.

Pete called back a few times over the following weeks, asking the same questions and checking on my symptoms. I'm still housebound as of today, but I don't know when I can leave. Part of what's unclear is when I should consider my symptoms as having started: when I first started feeling "off" on March 18 or when things ratcheted up on March 27. Both the IHC nurse and Pete don't really know how to answer that. Either way, it's now been well over the recommended seven days so I'm charting my temperature as my point of reference.

I have four kids who are twelve to twenty years old. My oldest, Wolf, is in college and had moved out for his freshman year, but he moved back home last summer so he could afford to live on his scholarship and math tutoring stipend money alone. Our house is a smallish 100+ year-old bungalow so staying isolated away from the kids while Nephi and I were sick didn't seem like a realistic option. Nephi and I were trying to continue working from home while helping our younger three kids continue their schooling online. Plus, our thinking went, they'd been exposed to us before we'd exhibited symptoms but were likely already contagious. 

So we carry on as best we can but haven't bothered keeping our distance from each other. We just keep everyone inside the house. The exception is for the kids to walk our three dogs while wearing masks (our yard is tiny so even short walks are a big deal to the doggos). Friends make grocery store runs for us and drop off occasional meals and treats to help keep our spirits up, which has massively boosted our morale while we try to keep from going cuckoo-bananas with cabin fever.

My mom got sick around the same time that I did, so I've spent a lot of time worrying and texting her to tell her to stay in bed (she's the kind of strong-willed person who makes herself keep working even when she's sick). She was tested a couple days before me because her symptoms hit her harder and sooner. She got her results back a day or two before mine came back: negative. Her doctor believes it was a false negative, since she's still sick with severe textbook corona symptoms. My sister-in-law took her to Instacare last week because she was doing so poorly, where they ran several tests. Her doctor said she was doing well for a seventy-year-old woman, all things considered, despite the severity of her symptoms, probably because she's religious about staying active and eating well. He told her to go home and stay the hell in bed.

We assumed the kids would remain symptom free, but Wolf lost his sense of taste and smell around the same time I did, so we can be pretty sure he's had the virus. The next week, Skye, fifteen, developed a sinus headache so intense that the painkillers we had on hand offered no relief. His debilitating headache lasted four days and by the end, he too had lost his sense of taste and smell. Camille, seventeen, and Jonah, twelve, have remained entirely symptom free, though we assume they're asymptomatic carriers.

The weird thing about this disease is that if I make a disciplined effort to rest and not do anything physical, I'll wake up feeling better for a day or two - still a little sick but with more energy, like things are turning around - so I'll get out of bed and do low-key activities like work from home at my desk, wash a few dishes, maybe sort some laundry. The next day, though, or even halfway through the first day, I crash hard. I wake up feeling bruised all over my body, my pelvis and ribs ache, my breathing gets more labored, my heart races again, my eyes burn, my fever spikes. So this disease is a liar.

As I wrote on Facebook last night when I couldn't sleep:

Here’s what it’s like four weeks out, intermittent fever aside. My chest feels hollowed out. My heart pounds if I stand up for very long. I experience frequent dizziness. If I take it easy for a few days, I’ll feel mostly well for two days and then on the third day I can barely get lot of bed. It’s been like this since mid March, so I can’t shake the belief that I shouldn’t still be feeling so shitty, except I have no mileposts to tell me how I should be feeling except others who have also tested positive. One person I know felt sick for a few days and is now back to going on long daily runs and lifting weights. Another person, the spouse of this first person who now feels well, is feeling much the same as I am: achy with poorly functioning lungs, racing heart rate, a fever off and on. And this second person is one of the most get-shit-done, zero-excuses, run-a-marathon-and-then-work-out people I’ve ever known. 

It doesn’t seem like the solution is just to let this virus run its course in the general population. I don’t think the people advocating for that course of communal action know what they’re really signing up for.

I'm in regular contact with the county health department as good old Pete continues to keep tabs on my recovery. I'm also in contact with the Instacare where I was initially tested and have spoken with my primary care clinic. I had a phone call with them, a nurse and a doctor, again this morning. They're all telling me that what I'm experiencing isn't abnormal - people's recovery timelines are all over the place, with many people taking a month or longer to get over it. The refrain from my medical personnel is "be patient." I should go in if my heart rate goes over 120 and stays there, or if my fever hits 102 and stays there. Otherwise, the course of action is just to stay in bed and wait it out. So that's where things stand for now. The hardest part is not knowing: how long this will last, or if I'm still a source of contagion, or if ... I don't know.

My ability to taste and smell is coming back. The first things I could taste were on the bitter spectrum - I became a little obsessed with espresso and IPAs. Every sip is a revelation.

When I'm well enough, I most look forward to heading up to the foothills to see the wildflowers, seeing what grocery stores are like now (I haven't set foot inside one since before March 13), weeding and watering and mulching my garden beds, baking bread for my family, and deep cleaning my now disgusting bedroom. God almighty, I'm desperate to disinfect and air out my entire house.