My Whole Family Has Covid-19

Here’s hoping that optimism — and lots of drugs — can bring us all out alive.

It’s 3 am. I’m jolted awake with a huge bout of anxiety and a full bladder. The past couple of days haven’t been as bad as I had expected, but right now, I can barely move. My body feels heavy and weak and the room feels like it’s spinning.

But I really have to pee.

I manage to peel myself out of bed and stand up. Holding on to the walls and door frames, I make it to the toilet.

What the fuck? She just hit me out of nowhere.

I use the bathroom and haphazardly pull my pajama pants back up and wash my hands. I feel like I’m going to pass out. I make it back to the bed and now, despite not being worried about being able to recover these last couple of days, I’m scared.

I had driven up from my temporary apartment in Miami where I’ve been working for several months. My plan was to see my youngest daughter for her 19th birthday and help move her into her first apartment in Dahlonega, Georgia.

Having been in one of the hot-spots of the Coronavirus pandemic, I was looking forward to a reprieve from the constant worry of living in such a densely populated city.

Our home in Canton, Georgia, where my adult kids and my mother live, has very few cases compared to Miami. Most people in this North Atlanta suburb don’t wear masks so I naively assumed it wasn’t as much of an issue.

I was supposed to stay a week and then head back. The first few days were relatively uneventful aside from the birthday dinner with my children, their significant others, my mother, and my ex-husband. We’d been very diligent about wearing our masks and using hand sanitizer. We even compared brands at the dinner table on who’s had the most alcohol content.

A few days later it was moving day for my youngest daughter. My oldest daughter mentioned that she hadn’t been feeling well and wanted to get tested, so she wouldn’t be helping us with the move. We wished her well and then quickly dismissed her announcement since we had to return the moving truck by 5 pm.

“Oh! Mom, Lena’s boyfriend is getting tested for Covid,” said my youngest.

“Oh? I hope he’s okay,” I responded. Lena was my daughter’s soon-to-be roommate. They’d been together quite a bit the previous week while planning for the move. The association never clicked amidst the hustling and passing of boxes into the moving truck. I was a mom on a mission — tunnel vision.

After the unloading of the truck at the new apartment, the assembling of Ikea nightstands, and hanging of curtain rods, my daughter, son, and I went to dinner. As we sat waiting for our pizza in the restaurant, they both mentioned having sinus headaches and feeling extremely tired.

“Sounds like you’re having allergy issues like your mother. It’s probably from stirring up all the dust from the move.”

“But I can’t taste anything,” said my daughter.

“Neither can I,” my son replied.

Click.

It has been four days since that moving day, and both my daughters and I have tested positive, as well as their boyfriends.

I guess I’ll be staying in town for a while. Having experienced a lack of inspiration lately, I was hoping for some alone time to write.

Be careful what you wish for.

The one person we have been most concerned about is my 78-year-old asthmatic mother who lives in the basement apartment. She appears to have the worst symptoms. During the past few months, the kids have been so conscientious about trying to keep her safe by wiping the house down and running errands for her. We got her results today — positive.

We sit in our assigned rooms and communicate with the other members of the household, via group text. Even grown kids love to give status updates about their diarrhea and almost shitting their pants. I respond to a request of Tylenol by opening my door and throwing it down the hall.

The next text after it lands in front of the requester’s door:

“Package has been delivered.”

I have to go down into the kitchen and make some lunch. Although I can’t taste, I know how imperative it is to keep my strength up for the fight. I grab a Clorox wipe from the foyer at the bottom of the stairs and proceed to wipe all surfaces, light switches, and knobs before I touch them on my way to the kitchen.

I make my lunch, but now that I’ve touched everything, I need another wipe to wipe what I’ve just wiped.

If the virus doesn’t do me in, the anxiety of trying to contain this invisible invader surely will. Not to mention lung damage from the Clorox fumes that I can’t smell.

It may seem a bit gratuitous since we all have the virus anyway, but we’re trying to keep each of our viral loads separate so we can heal. And with all the people in this house, I’m coming very close to losing my mind.

I hear my 21-year-old son cough as he walks down the hall to the bathroom. I yell at him from my room to cover his mouth and wipe down everything after he touches it. I know he won’t. Thankfully the cough suppressant in my cold medicine elevates my serotonin levels and keeps me placid enough not to kill anybody.

My best friend is using my positive diagnosis to take two weeks off work. Although she has no symptoms, her availability has been a lifesaver. She’s been dropping off groceries and medicine on our front porch when needed, and I’m happy that my suffering could bring her some much-needed down-time.

So far, each of us in this household has experienced extreme fatigue, body aches, dizziness, loss of taste and smell, and — aside from my mother — we haven’t had much of a cough. But from what I’ve heard, we can’t let our guards down just yet.

This Covid bitch can switch things up on a dime.

We’re all trying our best to be optimistic. Hearing my oldest daughter play her ukulele from her room down the hall gives me a sense of peace among the worry and uncertainty in our home. I’m thankful that I was here with my family when the virus struck so we could all be together.

Although my youngest is in her new apartment an hour and a half away, she’s still included in the family group text and diarrhea updates.

I’m honored to be in the trenches with these nuts.

I’ve had a Frank Sinatra documentary series on for several hours as I float in and out of consciousness from all the cold medicine. I’ll raise my fist in the air from my nest of comforters, in a gesture of solidarity and rebellion each time I rouse to the playing of My Way.

Not my family. Not without a fight.

All in all, I’m cautious to complain too heavily. I’m assuming not being able to taste and smell is much more tolerable than not breathing. I should take a shower since I probably stink, but nobody in this household would know anyway.

In hindsight, I realize we had gotten lax in our efforts to combat the spread of this virus than we had been in the previous three months. Maybe not having had any issues thus far gave us a false sense of security, and our instinctive need to be around our people and have some semblance of normalcy led us straight into harm's way.

All we can do is wait it out, and see how she decides to run her course.

If nothing else, this will definitely give me something to write about.