1.5 Weeks Of Terror
Apr. 13th, 2022 04:12 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
msconductEver since the beginning of the pandemic, I've been super-cautious about avoiding infection. Some of that's been about not wanting to get Covid myself, both because I have an autoimmune condition and because the more I read about long Covid the less I want to risk it. But some of it has also been about wanting to protect my mother.
My mother is 84 next week and has peripheral artery disease and COPD. That's a perfect storm of high risk factors for Covid. That might make her sound as if she's tucked up in her armchair wearing a little lace cap with a crocheted rug over her knees, but that couldn't be further from the truth. She's pin-sharp, very modern in her outlook, still driving, still bellringing as she has for fifty years, and generally living her best life. She's kept her COPD well under control for years by doing all the right things like regular exercise, but there's no denying the overall risk. Even though she is doubled-vaxxed with a booster (we don't have a second booster here yet as our Omicron wave was so late and we've only just had the first booster), both of us felt that the chances were high that if she did get Covid it might well be fatal.
For obvious reasons, therefore, I didn't want my mother to get Covid, and I especially didn't want to be the one to give her Covid. I can't imagine going through the rest of my life knowing I'd done that. Which is why I've been isolating, other than two weeks away as I posted here, for months. I work from home anyway so isolation doesn't feel that much different from my day to day life, and I'm more than happy to do it.
My mother has also been isolating. She has made the odd exception, though, like using click and collect to pick up her shopping. And she's also had regular home visits from a nurse. I assume other countries have this service too: because my mother uses steroid inhalers for her COPD, her skin is thin and she's always running into things and ripping her skin open, which also makes dressing the wounds difficult. A nurse therefore visits with high-tech dressings every couple of days and changes the dressings until the wound heals. It's a free service. Maybe that last part isn't universal.
I've been worried about these nurse visits from the beginning of the Omicron wave, especially when we got BA.2 at the same time as BA.1. My mother has and wears N95 masks for the visits, but BA.2 is so insanely infectious I was concerned about the transmission risk given that the nurse has to get quite close. Still, my mother felt she couldn't do without the visits, so there wasn't much I could do about it.
On the Monday before last, my mother rang. "It's not great news," she said. "I've got Covid."
I was absolutely terrified.
She'd had no more than a sniffle, but we're encouraged to get a test no matter how minor the symptoms, and to everyone's astonishment it was positive. My mother said she was feeling pretty good: it didn't feel like more than a cold. However, I know enough about Covid to know that how you feel in the first week isn't so much the issue: it's what happens after that, when the virus has begun to move on but you then discover, if you're unlucky, the devastation it's left behind.
It's a very odd situation when someone you love feels not all that sick, yet you know that there's a chance that they could be seriously ill only a few days later. I do not recommend it.
My mother felt a little worse during the week, but still cold-ish, and by the end of the week she'd improved a lot. In fact, she did better than numerous of my colleagues who are half a century younger than her but who have been moaning feebly about how Covid has, and I quote, kicked their arses. (So much for the mild and inoffensive nature of Omicron.)
Then on Saturday evening my phone rang. "I wanted to let you know what I'm doing," my mother said. "I've been having chest pains and Healthline says I should go to the hospital within the hour. I'm not sure if it's just indigestion, though." (Healthline is a free service where you can call about health issues and they assess you over the phone and advise you what to do. You can imagine how many staff they've added since the start of the pandemic.)
Heart attack! Myocarditis! Heart attack! Myocarditis! I was fairly vocal in my opinion that yes, she should do what Healthline said. (I managed, although only just, not to shriek this at her.) So she went to the ED. (Because she had Covid, I couldn't take her myself, and could only stay home, pace and wring my hands.)
Since she was convinced it wasn't anything serious, she didn't take much with her. So she was greatly miffed when they insisted on keeping her in overnight, especially when her ereader's battery died. "I'm dying of boredom!" she wailed via text. Personally, I was relieved, because they were doing blood tests, monitoring her heart and oxygen levels, and all that good stuff. At 2 a.m. they moved her into a ward with three other Covid patients, all geriatric and all very ill. "They were so much older than me!" she said. At almost 84, I kind of doubted that, but I knew what she meant. There's a lot more to age than simple years on the clock. (The Healthline guy had said "You don't sound 83". "I try," she replied modestly.)
In the morning, she reported, they gave her a horrible breakfast, including toast in a paper bag. (Because it was a Covid ward everything had to be thrown away. My mother was not impressed.) Slightly more importantly, they decided she was perfectly fine and discharged her. Oh, and they offered her indigestion medication.
But there was a sting in the tail: they weren't entirely sure she'd had Covid at all. They asked her if she'd done her own RAT and she said no, the doctor had done it. They looked dubious and gave her a PCR.
So that meant if she didn't have Covid, she had now spent the entire night in the same room as people who did and we could be back at the beginning. Wonderful. Absolutely wonderful. I spent the next few days doing more pacing and hand-wringing.
Today, she had a phone consultation with her family doctor. The PCR had come back positive.
What an unbelievable relief. Not only has she had Covid and survived it, it means she can now leave the house again, at least for the next few months until a new variant comes along as it probably will. (This is a huge deal as she lives alone and has found isolation really difficult.)
I'm aware that her risk will now be raised for heart and circulation problems, at least for a while. But it all could have been so very much worse. I'm so grateful it wasn't.
As for how she got it: she realised that like, as we say locally, a complete nong, she had taken her mask off as soon as the nurses had left, instead of airing the house out first. It wasn't much, but with Omicron you don't need much. One of the nurses turned up this week saying cheerily that she'd had Covid. Yeah. We know.
My mother is 84 next week and has peripheral artery disease and COPD. That's a perfect storm of high risk factors for Covid. That might make her sound as if she's tucked up in her armchair wearing a little lace cap with a crocheted rug over her knees, but that couldn't be further from the truth. She's pin-sharp, very modern in her outlook, still driving, still bellringing as she has for fifty years, and generally living her best life. She's kept her COPD well under control for years by doing all the right things like regular exercise, but there's no denying the overall risk. Even though she is doubled-vaxxed with a booster (we don't have a second booster here yet as our Omicron wave was so late and we've only just had the first booster), both of us felt that the chances were high that if she did get Covid it might well be fatal.
For obvious reasons, therefore, I didn't want my mother to get Covid, and I especially didn't want to be the one to give her Covid. I can't imagine going through the rest of my life knowing I'd done that. Which is why I've been isolating, other than two weeks away as I posted here, for months. I work from home anyway so isolation doesn't feel that much different from my day to day life, and I'm more than happy to do it.
My mother has also been isolating. She has made the odd exception, though, like using click and collect to pick up her shopping. And she's also had regular home visits from a nurse. I assume other countries have this service too: because my mother uses steroid inhalers for her COPD, her skin is thin and she's always running into things and ripping her skin open, which also makes dressing the wounds difficult. A nurse therefore visits with high-tech dressings every couple of days and changes the dressings until the wound heals. It's a free service. Maybe that last part isn't universal.
I've been worried about these nurse visits from the beginning of the Omicron wave, especially when we got BA.2 at the same time as BA.1. My mother has and wears N95 masks for the visits, but BA.2 is so insanely infectious I was concerned about the transmission risk given that the nurse has to get quite close. Still, my mother felt she couldn't do without the visits, so there wasn't much I could do about it.
On the Monday before last, my mother rang. "It's not great news," she said. "I've got Covid."
I was absolutely terrified.
She'd had no more than a sniffle, but we're encouraged to get a test no matter how minor the symptoms, and to everyone's astonishment it was positive. My mother said she was feeling pretty good: it didn't feel like more than a cold. However, I know enough about Covid to know that how you feel in the first week isn't so much the issue: it's what happens after that, when the virus has begun to move on but you then discover, if you're unlucky, the devastation it's left behind.
It's a very odd situation when someone you love feels not all that sick, yet you know that there's a chance that they could be seriously ill only a few days later. I do not recommend it.
My mother felt a little worse during the week, but still cold-ish, and by the end of the week she'd improved a lot. In fact, she did better than numerous of my colleagues who are half a century younger than her but who have been moaning feebly about how Covid has, and I quote, kicked their arses. (So much for the mild and inoffensive nature of Omicron.)
Then on Saturday evening my phone rang. "I wanted to let you know what I'm doing," my mother said. "I've been having chest pains and Healthline says I should go to the hospital within the hour. I'm not sure if it's just indigestion, though." (Healthline is a free service where you can call about health issues and they assess you over the phone and advise you what to do. You can imagine how many staff they've added since the start of the pandemic.)
Heart attack! Myocarditis! Heart attack! Myocarditis! I was fairly vocal in my opinion that yes, she should do what Healthline said. (I managed, although only just, not to shriek this at her.) So she went to the ED. (Because she had Covid, I couldn't take her myself, and could only stay home, pace and wring my hands.)
Since she was convinced it wasn't anything serious, she didn't take much with her. So she was greatly miffed when they insisted on keeping her in overnight, especially when her ereader's battery died. "I'm dying of boredom!" she wailed via text. Personally, I was relieved, because they were doing blood tests, monitoring her heart and oxygen levels, and all that good stuff. At 2 a.m. they moved her into a ward with three other Covid patients, all geriatric and all very ill. "They were so much older than me!" she said. At almost 84, I kind of doubted that, but I knew what she meant. There's a lot more to age than simple years on the clock. (The Healthline guy had said "You don't sound 83". "I try," she replied modestly.)
In the morning, she reported, they gave her a horrible breakfast, including toast in a paper bag. (Because it was a Covid ward everything had to be thrown away. My mother was not impressed.) Slightly more importantly, they decided she was perfectly fine and discharged her. Oh, and they offered her indigestion medication.
But there was a sting in the tail: they weren't entirely sure she'd had Covid at all. They asked her if she'd done her own RAT and she said no, the doctor had done it. They looked dubious and gave her a PCR.
So that meant if she didn't have Covid, she had now spent the entire night in the same room as people who did and we could be back at the beginning. Wonderful. Absolutely wonderful. I spent the next few days doing more pacing and hand-wringing.
Today, she had a phone consultation with her family doctor. The PCR had come back positive.
What an unbelievable relief. Not only has she had Covid and survived it, it means she can now leave the house again, at least for the next few months until a new variant comes along as it probably will. (This is a huge deal as she lives alone and has found isolation really difficult.)
I'm aware that her risk will now be raised for heart and circulation problems, at least for a while. But it all could have been so very much worse. I'm so grateful it wasn't.
As for how she got it: she realised that like, as we say locally, a complete nong, she had taken her mask off as soon as the nurses had left, instead of airing the house out first. It wasn't much, but with Omicron you don't need much. One of the nurses turned up this week saying cheerily that she'd had Covid. Yeah. We know.
no subject
Date: 2022-04-13 02:45 pm (UTC)Glad she is OK and you are OK.
no subject
Date: 2022-04-13 11:26 pm (UTC)