Survivor

I am a COVID survivor.

My college kid came home for her Spring Break in March, just when the first of the quarantines was going into place. She’s an independent young woman, a girl who hasn’t lived at home since the summer before she started college. Her first college summer she spent working at the family brewery in Nebraska, the second waitressing in her college town in South Carolina. This summer she was supposed to be an intern at a vineyard on the Rhine River. That was before COVID kept her from getting a visa.

Her week home to visit stretched into a month, as flights were cancelled and her worried parents argued against a return to a state that didn’t seem to be taking COVID very seriously, a return to the house she shares with two other college women. I’m not naive. I knew the likelihood that she and her friends would hunker down and keep social distance from other young adults was, as my husband says, “between Slim and None, and Slim’s out of town.”

But she insisted, and what else could we do? I couldn’t stand outside her bedroom holding the door shut, like I did when she was three and refusing to take a time out. So I made her a mask from an old t-shirt and dropped her at the airport, breath held, fingers crossed.

We knew in our hearts that if she went back to Carolina, she would get COVID. We hoped that it would be a mild case, that our healthy twenty-something daughter would sail through, that she wouldn’t suffer nine hundred miles away from her mama. We tried not to worry.

And somehow, things were all right. She went back to work at her steakhouse, sporting the heavy canvas masks they require of servers, and we thanked Heaven that her employers required masks. She spent time with friends, she went out to bars. She’s a young woman in college; of course she did.

On the day after Memorial Day, our daughter hopped into her car for the fifteen-hour drive home, so that she could be there for her sister’s high school graduation date. The graduation itself has been postponed to July, as has the party, but she wanted to be there for her little sister. The morning after she arrived, she got a phone call from one of her roommates: they’d all been exposed. My kid had been at a bar where a COVID patient, a friend of hers, worked. Later that night, when my daughter went home because of an early work schedule the next day, her roommates went to a party. The COVID friend was there, too, before he had tested positive. Both roommates were sick, sicker than they’d ever been, and they were getting tested.

So began our COVID journey. All four of us in the household came down with it, all with positive lab tests, so I’m in a good position for some first-hand observations of what it is like. Please note that these are just my anecdotal reports of what we experienced. It should go without saying that your experience may vary.

First: The effects of COVID can be very different from one person to the next. My daughter’s twenty-something roommates were sick enough with fevers and coughs that one of them planned to go to the hospital, had she not felt better the next morning. That particular young lady is as healthy as they come, other than the occasional sinus infection. The four of us in Baraboo never had fevers. We had very mild coughs, easily attributable to spring allergies. We had no shortness of breath. What we did have is fatigue and headaches like a stinging pressure behind the eyes, and for a few days the sensation of having inhaled water into our sinuses.

Second: The household members with asthma did not get any sicker with respiratory symptoms than those without. That underlying health condition didn’t seem to make a big difference, for us.

Third: The older adults both got a chicken-pox like rash on arms and legs, about as itchy as mosquito bites, and twenty to thirty spots in total on each. I hadn’t heard this reported as a symptom, but my doctor looked it up and indeed it is. The bumps went away after about a week.

Fourth: Three of the four people in the household experienced what was like a mild cold, or spring allergies, with scratchy throats. Two of the four had two days or so when they were fatigued. One – the one who brought this to us – was asymptomatic except for an occasional cough.

The fourth person – that’s me – has experienced something closer to a bout with mononucleosis than a cold. Two weeks straight of exhaustion and headache, peppered with bouts of energy when I felt like I was back to normal until the fatigue hit an hour later. I still get a headache if I look at a computer too long, and nap time is sounding pretty good about now. . .

Fifth: it’s really hard to know when it is safe to go out again. The official rules say that one needs to be symptom-free for three full days, and it must be at least ten days since the onset of symptoms, before one is no longer contagious. But do they really know that? I’d like to think that surviving COVID means I will have a little less need to fear spreading it to vulnerable loved ones, but I don’t think there is good evidence yet of when exactly contagion ceases.

Sixth: there is such a thing as a false negative. I had initially tested negative (an absurd result, when everyone else in my house was positive, when I’d shared food and drinks with three other positive-testers in my house). The first test, done in Sauk County, was less invasive, just a swab dabbed around the inside of your nostril, like having someone step onto your front porch and knock at the door. The second test, in Dane County, was a different bird entirely, more like someone charging inside the door and starting to do the dishes at your kitchen sink. Fortunately, the National Guard member who swabbed me in Madison warned me that he would push the swab in “until it hits resistance” and then “spin it around four times,” so I was prepared for the assault.

It’s ironic that I was praying for a positive result on the retest four days later, because otherwise my quarantine would be for two weeks after the last person in my house was symptom-free for three days. The positive result springs me from prison about two weeks earlier than the negative would have. A positive test also means that I, and my family members, can now donate plasma to be used to help the most seriously ill patients recover. We just need to make it two weeks after the end of symptoms before we are eligible.

Seventh: I’m proud to say that no new cases can be traced to our family. Everyone who saw us before we tested positive has tested negative. So for us, at least, wearing masks seems to have helped prevent infections.

I’m very grateful for the friends and family that have helped us out these past three weeks, delivering vital groceries and not-so-vital things like Aperol and tortilla chips and homemade vanilla cupcakes, bringing by straw for my potato plants since I can’t go get it myself, picking up our CSA share. Once I manage to string together three symptom-free days, I’ll return the favors.

Again, we were lucky. Most people will be “lucky.” Most people will have mild cases. This doesn’t minimize the fact that some people will die. Wisconsin’s current death rate is about 3% and the hospitalization rate is 13%, according to state officials. To put that in context, think of the last time you were in a group of thirty people. If they all become infected, four out of thirty will end up in the hospital and about one of them will die, statistically speaking. Think of thirty members of your family, or thirty friends.

I’m not writing this to reassure people that it’s not that bad. Rather, I’m concerned that because many people think they don’t know anybody who has had COVID, they think the threat is less serious than it is. Well, now you know somebody. Four people, in fact, if you know my family. You probably know even more, based on the number of people who have mentioned their own cases to me since I first posted this. COVID is going to be with us for a long time, folks, and we have to remain diligent with wearing masks and washing hands.

Take care of yourselves, and take care of each other.