One day in mid-February while walking my dog in Central Park, I called my brother to catch up. He had just been reading about the epidemic of novel coronavirus in China and was getting very anxious about it reaching the US. I laughed and told him that if it was going to show up anywhere, it would hit New York before it reached him in Chicago, and if I wasn’t worried, he’d be fine. I avoided following most news about the epidemic-turned-pandemic, at first because I didn’t think it was going to affect my life and I had a committee meeting coming up to focus on. Then I avoided the news because it was too stressful and I couldn’t handle thinking about it.
The pandemic in New York seemed to grow slowly, then explode all at once. A play I had been rehearsing for weeks with the Bard Hall Players was abruptly canceled the day before our first show. In a group chat with several friends, people chimed in one by one as their workplaces went remote. I was one of the last. I went into lab to grab the textbooks and materials I’d need to work from home, wrote “COVID-19” in my lab notebook, shut off all the microscopes, and went home.
Paige’s lab notebook shows the moment her lab shut down
My world became very small. I moved from my bed to the kitchen ten feet away, then back to my desk in the bedroom. We tried to maintain a sense of lab normalcy with weekly lab meetings and a new informal weekly check-in, but with none of us able to do experiments we quickly ran out of things to talk about. I postponed my committee meeting that had been scheduled for March, and tried to write pieces of my thesis so I wouldn’t be thrown entirely off track. I found it impossible to focus on working for more than twenty minutes at a time so I mostly just re-watched TV shows and tried to distract myself from the sirens going by.
Then, in mid-April, my husband woke up in the middle of the night with a fever. I was afraid that if I acknowledged that he might be sick with COVID-19 it would somehow become true. So instead, I hovered obsessively. I took his temperature and brought him water and tea, I didn’t let him go out to walk the dog. The next day I started coughing. I found that if I stayed completely still I was fine, but any movement, especially getting up or lying down, would send me into a coughing fit. A low fever followed, and eventually I just slept. I lost about five days to sleep. I was so exhausted it felt like my bones had been turned to lead. My joints ached and the coughing continued. Still, I had it pretty easy. After I had recovered I compared symptoms with two friends who had also gotten COVID-19, and they had much worse times of it. One friend was even considering going to the ER at one point but was ultimately able to recover at home. Then, almost as suddenly as the symptoms had come on, they were gone one day. I woke up with energy and an appetite for the first time in days. I thought I was completely over it until I was making tea. Usually my favorite peppermint tea releases a wonderful cloud of mint aroma when the bag is opened, but this time I didn’t smell anything. I stuck my head in the bag and still got nothing. Curious and a little nervous, I pulled out anything in my kitchen that had a strong smell and took giant whiffs, unable to smell any of it. By the next morning anything I ate tasted like bland mush. Only a day later, however, smell and taste were back and I seemed to be out of the woods for real this time.
A pile of re-usable masks awaits cleaning in a scene familiar to many New Yorkers
It wasn’t until my lab reopened and I was taking the subway again that I noticed how hard stairs were to climb. I had noticed I was short of breath when I was walking and talking on the phone at the same time, but assumed I had just gotten out of shape. This was different though, but the time I got to the top of the stairs I was panting and my lungs were burning. I would be sitting at home and be suddenly short of breath, manually taking deep breaths until it passed. I bought a pulse oximeter online, just to be safe. I started paying attention to the news stories of young, healthy people who had long-lasting effects from the virus and comparing what I was feeling.
It’s hard to watch so many people act like the pandemic isn’t happening, or that they couldn’t possibly be personally affected by it. It can be hard to wrap your head around the numbers of sick and dying, especially with how out of control the pandemic has gotten in America. Ultimately I’ve chosen to share my story in the hopes that one personal story can emphasize the overall seriousness of this pandemic. I have no idea how I got sick, or if someone else wearing a mask or washing their hands could have prevented it, but to be honest I’m really not interested in the specifics of my own infection. The damage to my body is done, but if I can prevent that damage from happening to someone else by wearing a mask and staying away from them, then of course I will. And I can only hope everyone around me and my loved ones will do the same.
