My Experience with COVID-19….so far
As we learned of the new coronavirus ravaging China at the beginning of the year I watched in horror at the stories of streets empty of people and doctors dying as the hospitals were overcrowded with victims. I hoped it would stay in China. Then Italy became the next horror that we watched unfold. And it wasn’t long until New York City became a place of devastation.
My daughter was home from college the second week of March. It is so hard now to realize that it has been that long since life had any semblance of normalcy here. At the Farmer’s Market on March 7 we had our first COVID experience as we saw a family we hadn’t seen in a while and instead of shaking hands we elbow and ankle bumped but more as a joke than out of fear. Though I had stopped shaking hands with clients at work. We were at an event on March 8 that we regularly enjoyed outside at a crowded restaurant. No masks, no “social distancing,” no realization of how much was soon to change.
A few days later my daughter and I decided to do a little shopping. We were starting to hear about toilet paper shortages so I asked her if she needed some and said we should probably pick a package up. We went to the dollar store and heard people saying that our major grocery stores in town had no toilet paper left so they were trying to find packs and the dollar store we were in was running low. We both grabbed a pack. We quickly learned that Lysol, Clorox wipes, hand sanitizer, and toilet paper were vanishing from every store. There was no hand sanitizer to be found anywhere or the ingredients to make it ourselves.
We needed to go to the grocery store to pick up a few items for dinner. That was when we knew we had stepped into the apocalypse. This was Thursday, March 12, early afternoon. Every cash register was backed up with long lines of people with carts piled high with beer, paper goods, food that could be stored. Shelves were empty. Most canned food, rice, and beans were gone. The world had clearly gone mad. And here we were with a cart full of just a few essentials for dinner. While waiting in line and trying to process what was occurring around us my daughter received the news that her college semester was being changed to all online classes. That is the last time I have been inside a major store. I have done curbside since that day. It was quite a challenge in the early days of this to get a pick up scheduled and is once again becoming more difficult as cases are spiking here.
My staff thought I had lost my mind as I announced they were to lock the doors and no longer allow clients in our building. We were transitioning to curbside service only. I required masks to be worn at all times. Some staff members decided they were nervous enough about the virus that they took a leave of absence.
I split my staff into two teams that worked different days since in the early days of the pandemic businesses had to close if they had a positive case. That was tough. Short staff, long days, very physically and emotionally draining.
We didn’t see our mothers or children. Our daughter didn’t understand why she couldn’t come home for Easter. We were most concerned about her possible exposure as her roommates were travelling to different areas and it took her awhile to understand to stop going out before her town was shutdown.
I brought my staff back together in May but remained curbside as our state, Texas, started to open up. I felt the governor was rushing the opening and wanted to wait it out a little. Unfortunately, I was right to feel we rushed the opening. Suddenly our area became a hot spot.
We tried to start living a little again. All I wanted for Mother’s Day was to see my mother and daughters so we decided to risk it. We had all been isolating. We took everyone’s temperatures and debated wearing masks. We kept some distance and enjoyed a meal that was picked up curbside. In the end I hugged my mother but we all questioned if a hug was safe.
COVID kept coming closer to me. No matter how careful I was I had a lot of employees that weren’t as isolated I was. The first scare was a new employee that went out to eat as the restaurants opened up. She received a call at lunch that one of the girls at her table a few nights prior had tested positive. Fortunately, the employee’s test came back negative. But as we were breathing a sigh of relief the next employee told us that her brother who lived with her tested positive. He was asymptomatic. While she tested negative the family had to go into a two week quarantine. Apparently several members of her family became ill during this time but she did not. Strangely the men in her family tested positive but the women tested negative.
Another sigh of relief and then the text that an employee had started feeling bad at work and when she got home started running fever and a list of very definite COVID symptoms. She was now out waiting for test results. Her symptoms started June 22. She was done with any quarantine time and back at work by the time she received her positive test result July 8.
On June 18 I had a strange encounter. I sat down at my kitchen table to do some work on my computer and I heard a whump sound and looked in front of me to see something on my table. My brain at first put the sound and sight together to say frog and then realized no, it was a bat. At two in the afternoon a bat had fallen onto my kitchen table. My main concern at that point was rabies. As my husband came to rescue me after hearing my frantic screams we became concerned that maybe one of our dogs had brought the bat in. I rushed to get them repeat rabies vaccines while waiting for animal control to come get the bat. Amazingly the bat was negative for rabies and I made the joke – “No rabies and I promise I didn’t make any soup!” I had no idea at the time that the bat might be a harbinger of things to come for us.
