IMPORTANT PUBLIC SERVICE ANNOUNCEMENT

IMPORTANT PUBLIC SERVICE ANNOUNCEMENT: Maddie and I are now officially mild but Presumed Positive cases of COVID-19. Before you freak out, I said MILD. We’re going to be fine. This isn’t about us. I make this announcement so you have a better understanding of what this social distancing stuff is all about. To protect OTHER people, and to share points I wish I had known that were getting lost in the general panic.

The TL;DR of it is: most people who get this are not going to die, true. In fact, they MAY NOT EVEN REALIZE THEY HAVE IT. Which is WHY EVERYONE, regardless of relative healthiness, needs to practice social distancing/self-quarantine, because you could think you just have a little cold and then you go out and KILL PEOPLE FOR WHOM IT IS NOT JUST A LITTLE COLD. It’s not about you getting sick, unless you ARE in an at-risk population of course—it’s about you not getting OTHER people sick. Also, you can’t come visit me and/or take me out for my birthday. Unless you want to like, bring me a couple bags of potting and/or garden soil, leave them on the patio, and yell “HAPPY BIRTHDAY!” in the window, and I’ll yell, “THANKS YOU’RE AWESOME!” from inside, and that’ll work. Not sure any garden stores are open right now, anyway.

Here’s the full story/details, so you can see how this is happening:

We got sick at the beginning of the month. Maddie had a fever for a couple of days—I did not, in fact I only took the opportunity to stay home from work because the kids were sick (Sam was also sick at that time, but his symptoms are all gone now), because I felt like I was just coming down with a cold. I had a sore throat and a little fatigue, a lot of coughing but sneezing, too, and everything that was coming out on the news said COVID-19 didn’t involve sneezing. Besides, there wasn’t a single known case in the entire state of Pennsylvania at that time. When Maddie’s fever had been gone for the required at-least-24-hours, she went back to school, because she’d already missed a huge chunk this year from her recurring migraines, and it was JUST a little cough, right? Being that I never developed a fever, I went back to work as soon as I could, too. I wrote this article about this, about how our society trains us to JUST KEEP ON PLUGGING if you can get out of bed: https://geekmom.com/2020/03/family-sick-days-can-be-good/ I still figured WE didn’t have the Big Scary Disease, though, and it wouldn’t hurt to go out in public. Long as we’re practicing good hygiene and whatnot.

After a week or so I developed the Red Flag symptom, the one thing on the “COVID vs Flu vs Cold” charts that only showed up in the COVID column—shortness of breath. Here’s the thing. I’m out of shape. I’ve let my exercise routine slide for the past half a year or so. I figured it was just because I WAS out of shape, and felt ashamed. Too ashamed to admit to anyone I was even HAVING this problem. It wasn’t BAD, it wasn’t like a full-on asthma attack or anything. Just a constant tightness in my chest. Earlier this week I carried a bunch of laundry baskets upstairs, and that did me in. I laid on the bed with my heart pounding, trying to catch my breath, feeling AWFUL, and that knocked some sense into me—maybe it was MORE than being out of shape.

By that time the school and library had closed. They were still working at the library, behind-the-scenes stuff, and I tried to go in, but when everyone realized I wasn’t feeling that well they were like “NO, GO HOME,” and I didn’t argue. I wrote THIS article about the relief I felt when everything closed, then how that relief started to fade as I realized people expected us to still DO stuff: https://geekmom.com/2020/03/theres-too-much-to-do-during-a-quarantine/ In retrospect, of COURSE the thought of Doing Stuff exhausted me. I AM supposed to be resting, not keeping busy!

Maddie, for the record, wakes up every morning and just says “I hurt.” I try to get more specifics than that, but that seems to be what it comes down to. Her throat hurts most, and occasionally her head, and often just everything. I keep asking about her chest/lungs, but that doesn’t seem to be bothering her. She often has no appetite, which is not something I’ve noticed in myself. And we both have wildly fluctuating energy levels—one moment we’ll feel almost-fine and be hopping around as usual, the next moment we’ll be falling asleep in our chairs (or in her case, often, on the floor).

On Tuesday Jason came home from work early because a guy he’d worked closely with was now being Presumed Positive, too (I’ll get to the “Presumed” stuff in a minute), and now everyone who’d had contact with him was on self-quarantine/work from home. That guy had also gone to work for nearly a week before he felt the need to stay home. This was the same day I did myself in by carrying laundry baskets, so I started to get suspicious.

There was already a little bit of news out there that people could be asymptomatic carriers. Couldn’t we therefore assume that many people might be PARTIALLY-symptomatic? Not following the exact description, but partially? Having every dang symptom but the fever?

On Thursday I read a Twitter thread from a young, generally-healthy person who had tested positive, but with a mild, non-life-threatening case. So much of it—all of it except the fever, which I STILL haven’t noticed in myself—was EXACTLY what I was going through, what Maddie was going through. UH-OH. First thing Friday morning I called the doctor. She agreed—a mild case of COVID-19 sounded exactly like what it was. She said that Washington County had set up a drive-through testing site, but that tests were limited, and so doctors were being really picky about who they gave them to. Jason’s coworker wasn’t given one—he was told to just ASSUME he was positive. My doctor decided, based primarily on how much social contact I get up to working in a public library, that I, on the other hand, SHOULD be tested and confirmed—and she still wasn’t even sure the testing clinic would agree when she sent them the scrip. But they did, and I drove through, and they stuck squabs up my nose that SERIOUSLY made me want to sneeze, and I will get the results, uh…sometime in the next week. So there are people running around out there who may have been exposed to me but I still can’t give them a definite—BUT THAT’S MY POINT!

THINK how many people out there have symptoms and are not getting tested at all! THINK how many people have been exposed but don’t have ANY symptoms, like Jason, whom I started calling Typhoid Mary until he corrected me that his name is actually “Corona J.” Don’t pay attention to the numbers on the news, because too many people may have the virus who are not getting counted! The doctor told me that they weren’t wasting tests on people who were already deathly ill, and if they died, their cause of death would be chalked up as “pneumonia.” Numbers mean nothing.

Ideally, it should be the people who AREN’T sick getting tested. The people who think they’re just fine, but will end up spreading their germs. But there aren’t enough tests for that.

So that’s what’s up. That’s why everything is closing. It’s not that we’re all gonna die, it’s that it’s too hard not to spread it to the people who WILL die. And I go back to that first article I posted: how HARD it is for us as a society to just stay home when we’re sick. This is what we need to be mad about—how we’re conditioned to work work work. We need to fight for paid sick leave, and ENCOURAGED TO USE IT instead of to save it. We need to fight for medical care that people aren’t afraid to use because of dang deductibles, and that makes a real effort to be preventative instead of just reactive—because in this case reactive is too late. I spent a week at the public library—luckily not on circulation duty—but still potentially spreading this to a wide variety of people, because I thought it was just a cold and I’d already taken three days off. I feel bad about that. The doctor read my mind and reassured me thus: “It’s not worth looking back and trying to figure out who you might have contacted and what you might have done differently at this point. There’s just too much going around to track. We can just do the best we can from this point forward.”

So from now on, let’s as a society allow ourselves and each other to TAKE A FRIGGIN’ BREAK.

And you’re allowed to laugh. Here’s a really amazing thematic Twitter thread you should check out: https://twitter.com/daniAWESOME/status/1240713705517539332

And again, don’t worry about me, I’ll be fine. I don’t need sympathy. But I WOULD like some fun birthday greetings in about ten days, so you can keep that in mind.