On These Strange Days.

Update? I dunno. Update. It's hard to know how to write about Coronavirus when I assume folks would prefer to read about literally anything else. If you're interested though, here's where I'm at. 

I'm officially considered recovered because: I contracted the illness over three weeks ago and I'm currently alive. This is both macabre and hilarious to me. On the one hand, I understand the need to have some kind of defined metric for what recovery means. On the other hand, I would not consider myself recovered. On the third hand, sometimes I picture a cartoon guy roaring into my face, "You're alive, aren't you?! Don't be so greedy!"

I'm still mildly short of breath, though it's getting incrementally better. The lingering off-and-on issues are the same as ever: a low-grade fever every few days along with aches, coughing, and the good old eye-burn. I'm going more days between the crummy days though. What never ceases is the continuing, noticeable lung pain. My chest x-rays last week indicated a small amount of lung damage. I'm in almost daily contact with my doctor who says a possible next step is a CT scan of my lungs to determine what's really going on. Even with insurance, however, that's an expensive procedure, so I'm currently in monitoring mode and assuming things will stay stable. My doctor says that's a safe course of action. In the middle of the night last night I was awoken by a stabbing pain in my chest, though it went away pretty quickly and I was able to fall asleep again. So I dunno. I don't want to think about it very much, to be honest. I hate that we don't know what recovery from this illness really means.

This is all boring health stuff, no? I mostly feel optimistic and cheerful, but I also really, really want to feel physically normal again. I don't know how to adjust to continuing physical cruddiness. I was privileged to have had excellent health before this and I'm trying to just observe my emotions and not be impatient with the process, but that's its own learning process. As my mom says sometimes, the work is to see the good gift in all things. There's a good gift in here somewhere.

Another pressure I know many others are feeling is about my kids' schooling. My kids have been struggling pretty hard with it, and I struggle to know how to effectively support them. I wish we could just cancel the rest of the school year, continue to pay teachers to figure out how successful instruction and learning will best work going forward, and regroup in the fall. What kids are able to do from home varies so widely and it truly seems like there's no fair way to grade what students are capable of in such disparate, chaotic circumstances. (Grades have always been imperfect and possibly useless measures of student learning and performance, in my unscholarly though not uninformed opinion.) My children are fortunate to have a stable home life; I can't imagine how much more challenging it must be for students who have less stability and support.

I've been on short term paid disability leave from my job, but I woke up yesterday and thought I was well enough to work from home so I gave it a go. It ended with what felt to me like disastrous results. At the end of the day, I requested an unpaid leave from my job so I could focus on more effectively supporting my two high school-aged kids until the end of their school year in late May and give my body longer time to recover. I feel like a burden to my company and I don't know how to deal with that.

I want to send out Thank You cards to everyone who's helped us out, but I don't dare yet, for fear I'll pass on the virus through the mail. I don't know how to accept support from my community with nothing in response except my own physically abstract gratitude.

I miss the Before Times. Everyone does in one way or another. We'll find ways to adjust to These Strange Days (or we won't -- you do you, I'm not the boss of your body -- I'm not really even the boss of my own body right now). I hope everyone reading this is well, or close to well. And if you're not, I'm sorry. If you're sad, I hope your heart finds succor. If you're ill, I hope you recover quickly and, whatever happens, that you make peace with your body and your life in a way that sustains you. That's my prayer for us all.

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.

On Getting Tested for Corona Virus.

I've decided to share my experience with COVID 19, partly because some people are claiming that the whole phenomenon isn't real. I doubt I'll change anyone's mind, but this is my experience.

Nephi, my husband, was sick with corona-like symptoms on March 12. He stayed home from work on the 13th and we tried to get him an appointment to be tested for COVID 19, but every medical person I spoke with said he wouldn't qualify if he hadn't traveled out of the country in the last month or been in close contact with someone who'd already tested positive. I was extra concerned because Nephi gets sick extremely rarely so it seemed unusual, and he has fairly severe asthma. We skipped a good friend's birthday party that evening because we didn't know what he had but wanted to err on the side of caution. We stopped leaving the house at all, except to walk the dogs. On Monday, Nephi went to a walk-in clinic and was tested for the flu, which came back negative. He was finally tested at my primary care physician's clinic on Tuesday, which, ironically, is when he started feeling better. They said it would take 2-10 days, but we wouldn't get the results for another two weeks.

March 13 is also the day we heard our kids would all have school at home for the next month, and my and Neph's offices both announced that everyone should start working from home.

I first started feeling weird, off, whatever you want to call it, on March 18. A fever would come and go, and its moments of absence made me wonder if it was all in my head. I felt lousy enough that I took the next day off work though. The fever and aches came and went for the next week. It also became a real struggle to concentrate effectively or think analytically, though that might have been from the mass anxiety and unease we're all experiencing from the pandemic and (in Utah, anyway) an earthquake and aftershocks. Whatever it was, it made working from home a real challenge.

On Friday, March 27 at around 11:00 or 11:30am, a fever hit for real, my eyes started burning, and my chest felt tight, like there was a baseball right behind my sternum. I still questioned my physical experience, like what if I was imagining this into coming true? Is that possible? If so, maybe I could talk myself right back out of it. But the fever kept creeping higher and my breathing got worse, so I called the Utah Corona Virus hotline around 3:30pm. A guy named Sid who talked like a cowboy answered the phone and asked me a lot of questions. Turns out his sister has the same birthday as me. I wondered to myself how Cowboy Sid ended up answering the Utah Corona Virus hotline. Sid told me I should get in to get tested ASAP before they closed for the day instead of waiting till the next day. 

I drove over to the IHC location closest to my house where a woman in a mask met me in the parking lot, verified that I'd been screened via phone before coming in, stuck a number on my windshield, and told me to stay in my car in the parking lot till they were ready for me. I was lucky number 44. When it was my turn to be tested, I drove into a tented parking space and a medical person in a body suit (like something out of the movie E.T.) came over and gave me a handout with information on it. When she tested me, she stuck a pair of 10 inch swabs up my nose, first one nostril and then the other. The first time was uncomfortable but the second time felt like being punched in the face, hard. She said I took it like a champ and would get my results in 2-7 days. Then I drove home, poured myself a little Aberlour scotch, and joined my coworkers for the end of a Friday Happy Hour video conference call (I really miss my coworkers).

The scotch was the last thing I would remember being able to taste for the next week or two (does time smear together for all of us now?). The next morning, my 20 year old son came into our bedroom. He was freaking out because he'd suddenly lost his sense of taste. I rolled my eyes at his melodrama, but later when I was drinking my morning americano, it tasted very watered down. Perplexed, I asked Nephi what beans he'd used. He held up the bag to show me: same beans as always, my favorite from Cafe Ibis. I privately wondered if he'd pulled a weak shot of espresso by accident. I didn't realize that it was a sign of things to come. Within a few hours, I'd completely lost my sense of taste and smell as well. It was most noticeable as a massive absence, a hole where something important should be. I could now understand Wolf's upset and no longer thought he was overreacting. Over the next week, I didn't have much of an appetite, but mouth-feel became the only thing that mattered when it came to food. I dumped cayenne on everything I ate, just to experience some taste sensation in my mouth, even it was just burning.

 A sense of absence, of loss, has come to define this whole experience.

(More later. I need a break. Lack of energy has also defined this experience.)

On Visiting Ivo.

A few years ago, I worked as an assistant producer on a documentary about Utah and the people who represent our often unusual statistics (Most Family-Friendly State, most plastic surgery per capita, most polygamists, most families headed by parents in a gay partnership, most fitness-oriented state, highest sugar consumption, hottest co-eds, etc.).

While the doc was in the editing phase, the publicly-funded entity underwriting the project decided it was too controversial and wasn't worth courting trouble in that specific political moment, so they killed it. It's a damn shame because it was a great concept and we interviewed some really interesting, amazing people from all walks of life. I feel so lucky to have been a part of the project while it lasted.

One person we filmed for the doc was a guy named Ivo who lives out in the west desert near the state line in an old airplane hangar that had been built during the second World War. I took a lot of production photos as the crew crisscrossed the state, and this is a slide show from that particular day.

On Teaching Jason to Knit.

 Jason is a friend of mine, a writer who used to, let's be frank, make fun of my knitting. It's because he makes fun of everything -- it's just his way. Then he made the mistake of admitting that he kind of wanted to learn how to knit too, so I taught him. It took a few hours (because I can't sit still and teach in a very linear way), but by the time he left my house, he'd gotten it.

He was surprised that it was harder than it looks [cough-I-make-everything-look-easy-cough]. He had his second lesson tonight, on picking up dropped stitches, of course. He said he's worried that he's going to finish his first project, a beanie in Lamb's Pride Bulky, too soon and not have anything else to knit until he can get back up to my place so I can help him cast on again (he lives 45 minutes away). Is that not the cutest thing ever? Maybe. It might be. I'm so proud of him.

On Another One.

 

This is my version of sev[en]circle. I first saw one of these babies in Portland. The yarn is bits and bobs of Noro Kureyon and a little Silk Garden. I didn't expect the thing to be so warm, but it really is. I LOVE IT.

On Babies in Bonnets.

This little nugget is the long-awaited baby girl of my friends Derek and Rachel. Her name is Rose, but they called her Nugget for the extent of Rachel's pregnancy, so it's hard for me to call her anything else. I knit the little baby bonnet out of Knit Picks Shine Sport and Manos Cotton Stria. Credit goes to Rachel for picking the colors.

TEST!

This has been a test of the Mobile Blogging System. If this had been an actual blog post, you would have died of shock.