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hmlegacy · 3 years

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My COVID-19 Experience (Long Story)

In late September, around my birthday, my aunt got weirdly sick. This is the aunt that was diagnosed with Stage III or IV stomach cancer last October, in 2019. She took and completed chemotherapy successfully, her cancer is in remission, she was doing great. That being said, she just got off the chemo in perhaps July? If you don’t know, chemotherapy absolutely wipes out your blood cells and depletes your counts. This means you are susceptible to all sorts of illness.

We have been doing every guideline imaginable with this pandemic. We didn’t go out except for necessities--even if we did go out for a superfluity, we had the mask, we wore gloves and disposed of them, and we were constantly washing hands or using sanitizer. From March to October--7 months--we were good. Then all hell broke loose.

My aunt got diagnosed with pneumonia. The doc in the box, however, did get scans of her lungs and found the telltale crystallization and wanted to do a COVID-19 test. My aunt only had a few symptoms but, naturally, they were weakening her supremely. Just got off chemo. Thusly, because of this, she also was taking all necessary measures. Her best friend who lived down the street from her would bring her groceries...however, this best friend is also a community church leader, she would get the food from the banks and redistribute it to the homeless in our urban areas of town. A beautiful gesture...but is putting you around people that probably are not wearing masks.The friend is similarly sick but, due to my aunt’s immune system, her symptoms generate quickly.

My mom takes my aunt to the hospital because she is getting no better treating it as pneumonia. My mother is using the mask and everything but the negligent hospital actually allows her to stay in the room...because they think it’s pneumonia. It is not pneumonia. Come to find out, she is COVID-19 positive.

My cousin and I had a conversation with a longtime cohort of ours. It went like... “I got a call from (aunt’s best friend) and she was making these long dramatic pauses and my heart just plummeted.” I said, “Yea, you thought she was gonna say your mama was gone, right?” “Right! And she was just like...’I’m not feeling well’.” The cohort expressed his confusion as to why we were so...pessimistic. I advised “We’ve been through that call a lot”.

My aunt’s best friend died.

So, so, so much confusion. She was younger than my aunt, had some breathing issues but they were being treated, and she was very energetic. She went to the hospital--the hospital kicked my aunt out, saying it was not ‘safe for her’. My aunt went home...and recovered. They had her friend and kept her. Every day, the story changed but it sounded like...she was getting better? They were giving her steroid treatments, they put her in an induced coma to keep her fever down, the doctor said she’s doing ‘much better’. I woke up to my mother screaming. She was gone. She also had COVID.

My mother...went to where I work in administrative to get the testing. The only person she’d had contact with, really, was my aunt. She also had COVID...and, therefore, the rest of us had COVID.

I’m not describing the time frame well at all. It’s just jumbled. But there were spaces where COVID-19 was dismissed and not on the table by certain professionals. Testing here still is taking upward of 3-5 days. My dad, the hypochondriac, goes to a facility, they diagnose him with upper respiratory infection. Down the damn hill from there.

I love my dad to pieces but he is the most dramatic human being I know. He’s the type of person that will list details about the past and throw in a line like “so really, you’re lucky that you were born” or something to get an emotional response. And because I’m not that person, I’m just like “I mean, if I wasn’t born, how would that have affected me? I wouldn’t be there?”. He’s just a very...emotional human being and I’ll admit...we tend to not always take him seriously as a result.

I started coughing. Tired. Weak. Fatigued. My mom had similar symptoms. Nonetheless, if I had to call it anything, I’d say it was like a moderately bad cold. My dad also had the same but he kept saying, ‘this is bad. I’m telling you, this is bad’. As a reminder, I have T1 diabetes, hypothyroidism, and, per the diabetes, heart disease to a degree so I am not...a great candidate for being around illnesses. But, I trucked through and helped my mom care for my dad...after my aunt’s best friend died, my dad insisted we take him to the hospital.

This probably is where the story diverges away from ration and takes on what many might call ‘conspiratorial’...but, another reminder, we are black. Historically, our medical complaints get ignored until we are fully in the throes of the worst possible outcome or dead. I complained about my heart from the time I was sixteen years old, it was always kind of dismissed as ‘that’s weird’ and a shrug, and it took me having a small heart attack at 28 years old for it to be taken slightly seriously. The hospital that had been keeping the best friend? Well, in my experience, they literally kicked me out perhaps four hours after I had my stent placed. Basically, we don’t trust hospitals often.

My mom is sobbing. My oldest brother is irate. We don’t trust hospitals, he’s like, ‘no, no, don’t take him to the hospital. What happened to best friend is going to happen to him’. I’m thinking, ‘look, I’ll take him to my alma mater’s hospital, they’ll do the testing, they’ll reassure him, and he’ll feel better’. That’s how his hypochondria works, once he knows what it is, he recovers so much better, even if it is the basic cold. So I take him, they give him a pulse ox reader, an inhaler, and tell him to isolate until the results get back and send him home.

We’re all relieved. For a few days. He is deteriorating. I try to treat him for his symptoms but he is not doing great. I took his pulse ox, it was reading 75. Should be in the upper 90s, ya’ll. I called my alma mater’s hospital, she basically admits the things are faulty, but, that if it’s showing that low, it’s probably not a good sign and he needs to come to the hospital. Panic again, I take him back.

By this point, I’m like, ‘Do I even have this thing? I’m treating it like I do but...’. So, when I take him in, I tell them we’ve had exposure and I would like to get tested. The hospital takes me back and a nice nurse tells me, ‘look, this thing is crazy. It’s essentially unavoidable--it’s everywhere. And it is not being addressed correctly’. While not reassuring in any way, this did make me realize it was just a matter of time before this occurred...just wasn’t expecting it like this.

Naturally, because this is where I get all my treatment, they go in and find that, uh, you had a heart attack? And, essentially, they just admitted me. I was like, ‘no, no, I’m okay, I think, I just want testing’. But they give me the whole routine to be safe, x-raying my lungs, blood tests, EKG--my EKG looked normal when I was having the heart attack, I really just want them to stop utilizing this thing. I hung around, they took the test, found everything looked okay...but they are going to admit my dad.

They allow me to go see him which was also crazy and I hung around for a while. He looks really, really bad. This is not his dramatics. I video call my oldest brother and he’s just devastated because, seriously, if any of my dad’s dramatics are at work, it seems like he’s just given up. But he does insist he hasn’t, he just doesn’t know. I tearfully leave him and the doctors here seem a bit bewildered by my response and insist he’s going to be just fine. I look at my online portal results in a few days, I also have COVID.

My older brother is on the autism spectrum. He is verbal to a very, very small degree--he speaks words but you have to know him to know how to apply them (Like “left” means “the highway”). It’s a very short list of words and he doesn’t offer many to us to use to have him understand--mostly because, if anything, he is insanely stubborn and does not want to understand. It is his way or he’s going to have a violent outburst or just flat out ignore, even to his detriment. My mom was eating a bowl of soup--he snatched it from her, something he has never done, and basically drinks it. Before anyone can say anything, he has consumed this bowl of tainted soup and we’re all just gawking at him in horror.

Needless to say, he also got COVID-19. He was...okay, for a bit. Seems to be the story. Then, slowly, he just can’t get out of bed anymore. He starts vomiting, he has gastric issues, he cannot eat, and he is falling. Meanwhile, my dad is in the hospital and I am increasingly fatigued and hurting. My knee injury from 2011 flares up intensely and I am in excruciating pain. I’m like, ‘this cannot be COVID’. Nope. It is, per the nurse assistant I called.

Everything--and I mean everything this illness could have targeted, it targeted. I was nauseous, I was hot (but no fever?), in pain, and tired. But, again, because my mother and I were the least sick in the house, we had to keep trucking along. My dad stayed in the hospital for a week. He started hallucinating and I guess that was the final straw, they said, ‘he’s good’. I went and picked him up, he was...weird. He came home with a lot of tomfoolery and drugs that literally had as the first accepted side effect ‘hallucinations’ and incessant hiccups. Again, another symptom of COVID.

We fixed that. But my poor brother, he was...he was in tough shape. Like, he could not keep anything down. There were days where he seemed to recover and then went back down for the count. Because this particular hospital did so well with my dad, we took him there as well. It’s a little trickier with him, if he does not want to be there...he does not want to be there. He was ready to go by the morning of the next day and was in full angry mode at points. Only my mom could stay, however, so she had no real calming support. They didn’t really get a good grasp on what was wrong with my brother--they tried multiple diagnoses but none of them checked out. They found his anti-seizure meds were destroying his blood counts so they changed that and sent him home...so he could just continue to be fatigued and tired.

Everyone...is okay. My aunt recovered but her best friend and closest companion is gone. The husband’s family blamed my aunt at the woman’s wake, over her body, for her death and, if you ever wonder why I write such dramatic stuff, this is why, this is the nonsense I end up around. I can’t...imagine the pain of not being able to properly attend your best friend’s funeral because of shunning but my aunt was in pieces and I admit, I was ready to go fight some people. My cousin almost did--I promise you, this lady was the sweetest woman and, if there is an afterlife, she is probably just as appalled. Her mom called my aunt and told her not a living soul in the best friend’s family thought she had anything to do with it.

I write this long AF journal to say...this thing is all types of real. I didn’t have it that bad--the mildest form, I would say, compared to most, just aside from being asymptomatic. But I do feel somewhat different. My thoughts feel like they’re in a fog--I’m still a bit tired but I’m always tired. Forgetfulness and jumbled are my biggest peeves though. I’m keeping sharp but, observing it in my parents, it’s a little...concerning. We luckily don’t seem to have longterm breathing issues but...

Bro is okay. I’ll admit to my fault that we didn’t a hundred percent realize how bad that drug for his seizures were. Depakote...was apparently a big component in a lot of his angry outbursts. He’s been having these outbursts for twenty years. I don’t...understand how he had all these doctors that we explained his behavior to and they were just like ‘that’s normal’ when he has meds with these side effects. The new meds, unfortunately, made him depressed so he was crying a lot and we don’t like that either but with some tweaking, he’s...about the nicest guy. Still demanding, really, but he’s...got more patience. Not bursting into tears too much or angry too much, just very balanced and cordial. About...really the only good thing to come out of this.

I will say, do take this seriously. We weren’t fooling around and got this thing, we were helping a family member not die. But that means you can definitely get this with some of the behavior I’ve seen--please, we’re getting new leadership, we’re well into a vaccine--I know people can’t avoid work. I know people can’t always avoid going out either--it is detrimental to a lot of people’s mental health which I don’t think many people on specifically this site grasp? There’s multiple reasons why being contained in a house is not mentally healthy for some people. That being said, don’t...go to weddings with hundreds of people? Don’t have weddings with hundreds of people. I know we all had plans for this year, I know I did--but don’t be a source for anyone having to suffer. If you must, if you want, just keep it small and contain yourself afterward. We are almost there.

My experience was a best outlook outcome...and someone in the story still died.

#covid-19 #covid #experience #journal

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