a year after the global pandemic began, a 24-year-old marathon runner catches covid
I am no stranger to being sick alone — three years of singleness and a lifestyle of burning the stick at both ends landed me sick in college taking care of myself many times. But a whole year into a global pandemic, and I was staring down weathering a sickness alone that scared me more than any others: a positive test result for covid only months away from my eligibility for a vaccine.
I wasn’t angry. It felt inevitable. I am in my mid-twenties, barely scraping by — the pandemic exacerbated that, still burning the stick at both ends and hustling numerous jobs to make ends almost touch. I didn’t have the luxury to stay home the past year.
That made it ironic to learn that all my preventive measures — mask wearing and outdoor dining — had worked. My Achilles heel ended up being one of a man. I was exposed to covid Feb. 22, the saliva swapping kind of exposure. I tested negative the next day, but I tested positive three days later. Here’s my experience:
The twilight zone
The first day or two after exposure, my right eye kept twitching which I attributed to stress. I continued to have a persistent cough from running in the cold the past months. But later that week a regular light cough popped up along with congestion. As someone who works face to face with people on the weekend, I decided to get retested to be safe.
I woke up Saturday after a bad night of sleep to the 6 a.m. email: POSITIVE.
“Fuck, I was supposed to work today,” I thought.
Half asleep, I immediately texted everyone I had close contact with the previous week, starting my own contact tracing.
I was not going to work.
Saturday descended into a hectic line of calls to my parents and friends. And the wait started. I watched a lot of TV to distract myself from the panic attack clutching my chest. On Sunday, I talked with a D.C. contact tracer who woke me up early in the morning for a 45 minute conversation that spanned known contacts to my current symptoms. I signed up for text check-ins after that, it was too much talking.
I immediately, if not a little too positively, scheduled two tests for my 9th and 10th day the next week, hoping they’d clear me to go back to work early the next weekend. My dad told me to buy a pulse ox, which tracks your oxygen levels if I got really sick, but I blew him off. I was determined I would not need it.
I thought about the virus like an acid trip. The drug was already in my body. I was in for a ride no matter what. The best thing I could do was stay grounded and positive even if a bad trip was coming, my approach could make it better.
I banished negative thoughts and settled into my apartment waiting for covid to work it’s way through my body. I drank a lot of water and tea and talked for hours on the phone with family and friends. I stayed fever free through the weekend. I ended Sunday night dancing to SZA’s “Good Days.” Spirits were high but then Monday came.
The roller coaster
I remember it rained — perfect sick weather. And my temperature finally spiked to a low grade fever of 99.5. My two dogs were back with me. The most isolated method of letting them out to do their business was a nine flight climb of stairs to a rooftop dog park above my apartment complex. That’s when I really knew I had covid. Through two masks and all the flights — I felt my lungs struggling. I’d run a seven minute mile just the week before and finished a twenty mile run just a few weeks prior. Those steps shouldn’t have been an issue.
On Monday, the aches came with the fever — a tight knot in between my shoulder blades. I slept most of the day between eating and drinking water. I forced down some turkey and vegetable soup with fresh chopped turmeric. It became my standard dinner for the next week.
I sucked on lemons and tried not to think about all of the work that sat waiting on my computer and all the money slipping through my fingers.
I thought about all the people I’d written about over the last year who got covid. I thought about the kids in jails without their moms, the men and women in prisons put into isolation to deal with their symptoms and the undocumented family in an article I was currently finishing — they weren’t sick anymore but homeless because of the pandemics effects.
Sometimes, as a journalist, you feel like you can only write about something for so long before sweet serendipity knocks with it on your door or in this case on my cell walls.
I fell asleep early Monday night exhausted imagining a fire consuming my body, cleansing it of covid. Tuesday the fever broke and I tried to convince myself that the shortness of breath was just anxiety even as I buried my face over a steaming bowl of water with eucalyptus essential oil to clear my airways, and as I worked in childs pose on the floor to relieve my lung distress.
The New York Times released an alert for another article about the people that covid has killed — I’ve never swiped a push notification away so quickly in my life. After a year of living and breathing covid news, it was the last thing I wanted to absorb while the virus gallivanted through my body. The fear of the unknown and deadliness of this virus was always in the back of my mind the entire 14-days.
Climbing the nine flights of stairs to let the dogs out was getting increasingly more difficult. But I only did it twice a day. My dogs are the real heroes of this story with their patience and never-ending cuddles. I was never truly alone.
Wednesday, I woke up less achy and with a burst of energy. I made gluten-free cinnamon rolls and began to clean the house. I watched more TV or movies, I don’t remember and drank water and Gatorade religiously like my life depended on it because it very well could.
On Thursday, I felt even better. I took a shower because everyday I wanted to be as clean as I could in case things took a worse turn toward the hospital. I finished cleaning the house and putting all thirteen dog toys my pups pulled out to get me to play with to no avail while I languished on the couch. I worked for a few hours on my computer. My cough was completely gone, though the congestion stayed. I really thought I was through it. I’d lost 7lbs, but all in all I thought it was a pretty mild case. I only remember a really deep tiredness hit me, striking me as odd.
That night I lost my sense of smell. I lit incense and realized its normally intoxicating smell wasn’t registering in my nose. The next five days my nose would get this burning sensation on and off in my nostrils. I could still taste so I just assumed this was the parting gift. I went to bed at a normal time and woke up Friday a little wary but still thinking I was through the worst.
The second wave
But Friday afternoon, my feet got cold. And then my whole body couldn’t get warm. “FUCK,” I thought. “This, this is not good.”
I pulled on two pairs of socks, pants, and thermal tops and buried into my bed with a hot rice bag and extra blankets. I woke up a few hours later sweating with a climbing fever. 102.3. This. This was not good. I called my pediatric doctor mom at work. Pushing down tears. “Was I actually gonna get sick, like really sick,” I thought. Luckily, she was too busy to be more than matter of fact with me. “Go back to sleep and call me later,” she told me. All I could do was wait it out. That’s the thing with covid. Once you get on the ride, there is no getting off, no tap out.
My mentality the whole time was breath by breath: just get through the next nap, the next night, the next day. The only way to get over covid is through it. And that’s if you’re lucky.
I watched an animated kids movie about dragons before I dropped back into a fever sleep. I woke up at 3 a.m. Saturday, the tenth day, struggling to breath. It felt like two giant hands lightly squeezing my lungs from the back. I lay there trying to convince myself that I was breathing even if I couldn’t feel it. My temperature was over 101 still. I was drenched in the pail of my own sweat. “I can’t breathe really well.” The thought kept recycling itself over and over in my head.
So at 4 a.m. on Saturday I pulled myself out of bed and drew a hot bath and put a podcast about Portland and antifascism on. I didn’t want to hold myself up in the bath — I was weak.
“You’re going to sit in the bath until the podcast is done,” I told myself. I was too tired and felt too shitty to be scared. The only way was through. I sat in the hot water alternating between hands above my head and counting my breaths in and out, and just draping myself over the bathtub in exhaustion.
Between descending into brain tirades of “Fuck I can’t really breath,” I panicked about going to the hospital. Because going to the hospital with covid, isn’t just going to the hospital. You have to get there without infecting other people and taking up a bed. I started planning on packing my clothes and logistics for dog care at a friend’s house. I’d started packing while waiting for the bath to fill. I didn’t want to think like that but that shit was kicking my ass hard, scary hard. I wanted to get ready before I couldn’t.
The bath worked. I was able to go back to sleep and then watch T.V. until a neighbor dropped off supplies and a pulse oximeter so I could know if I needed to head in to get my lungs oxygenated or not. My dad had been right. The good news was I was feeling better, and my blood never dipped below 93% oxygen.
I spent the rest of the day pounding liquids, unable to eat, swapping the pulse ox out for the thermometer and sleeping. The fever stayed but my oxygen level never dipped too low. At some point, my gluten intolerant self woke up starving to raid my roommates pantry for gluten filled crackers. They put me to sleep Saturday night for better or worse — my fever still persevering. I’d developed a deep chest wracking cough.
Over the summit
I woke up Sunday, relieved to have slept through the night. My fever had dropped but not left. My eyes were swollen and hives covered my body. But my body felt weird. “Was it the gluten?” On quick Doctor Google consult, the itchy red marks across my body looked exactly like covid rash. “Fuck it, I’ll take it and the puffy eyelids if I can breath,” I thought.
I spent day 11, Sunday, sleeping and drinking liquids. My aunt brought me more groceries and dried lavender. I smelled a bit for the first time since Thursday when I crushed the lavender in my hands.
I was hopeful I was turning a corner but too tired to focus on much more than feeding and hydrating myself. I talked with my parents who both said I sound better, some nice affirmation for the work my body was putting in.
I was too scared to be hopeful, too afraid to process the fine line I’d danced the last two weeks. I woke up Monday morning with my fever gone but itchy hives still blanketing my body in red swathes. I took Zyrtec twice a day, and they calmed down. My covid case manager called and cleared me from their system — I’d technically been fever free for 24hrs.
The other side
It felt like I was still walking too near to the cliff edge even if I was now headed the right way, away from it. The dogs got a proper two block walk on Tuesday. I still sat down, exhausted, while they peed. My temperature was still elevated and the fever came back a few times, filling me with dread that covid was going to pull me back under.
That’s the thing about this virus — it feels like a ghost haunting your body, pushing for any weakness in your body or health to burrow into.
By my 14th day, Wednesday, my temperature was normal for long enough that I knew I wasn’t contagious. I began to return to normal life. By Thursday I was doing a TV segment and showing up for job interviews. Because in America, there is no rest under capitalism. Like many people I’ve written about, I was lucky to be better but now looking at the loss of half a month of income.
I still felt scared and cautious. “Had I really made it?” I showed up for my last covid test that Friday. Before the nurse stuck the Q-tip in my nose, she looked straight in my eyes and said matter of fact, “I am glad you’re alive.”
That shook me. It was the first time in over two weeks since my symptoms first appeared, that I allowed myself to sit with it. Because the whole time the virus was beating my body up, it was like looking up in the sky but avoiding staring directly into the sun. I tried to think about everything except the terrifying ride I had been on.
I’d gotten covid. I’d survived covid. So so many hadn’t.
I danced in the middle of D.C. on the sidewalk when I got my negative test result a few days later. My body had beat that virus out of me. I’d won. My first run, a week after I’d been cleared, everything hurt. I still can’t talk without losing my breath. I get tired from a short day, but I don’t have to go to sleep at 8:30 p.m. like I did the first week in recovery. My body still feels weak. My cough comes back in diminishing waves.
But I’m alive. I really couldn’t ask for anything else.
In the end, I checked off every covid symptom listed except loss of taste and vomiting and ran the usual 14 day sick period with a second wave. Thank you to everyone who loved me, supported me and sent well wishes my way. It mattered ❤ . Even though I was by myself , I was never alone.
Things that helped me:
- Icy hot rub on my chest
- Hot rice bag on chest and aches
- Hot bathes
- Tea with honey and lemon
- Soup
- Hydration
- Sleep
