People of Rochester - Lin
Lin is an athletic, healthy woman who loves to bike, work out, practice yoga, walk, travel, and spend time with her loved ones. She’s also the first person I've talked to who tested positive for the coronavirus. Here's Lin's COVID-19 experience, in her words:
It was March, Friday the 13th, and I'm not superstitious at all; I only recognized that after the fact. I woke up and knew something was wrong as soon as I opened my eyes. Before I even got out of bed, I felt like a truck had hit me. I didn't immediately think it was coronavirus; I just knew I was sick.
Every muscle and joint in my body hurt, and I had fever and chills. I was totally exhausted, and I had a splitting headache. And I never get headaches, ever. I also had an itchy rash on my chest. I didn't eat anything that morning. I had no appetite at all.
I called my doctor, who told me to go to Immediate Care. I knew I couldn’t drive in; so my daughter Jen drove me in. We both wore masks and gloves.
At Immediate Care, they didn’t have a coronavirus test yet, but they tested me for the flu. For the 15 minutes it took to get the test results, I fell asleep. They said, you're negative for the flu, but we're going to give you Tamiflu (antiviral medicine), which should help with your symptoms.
On the way home, while my daughter was in Walgreens waiting for my prescription, I fell asleep again, in the car. When I got home, I went back to bed and slept for two days straight, Friday and Saturday.
The Tamiflu started kicking in and on Sunday, I woke up and felt slightly better. I still had a fever. I remember that during the 10 days that I had a fever, it got up to 103. Although I didn't have chills anymore and some of my symptoms were lessened, I woke up with a sty in my eye.
The Tamiflu dampened some of my symptoms for the five days I took it. After that, I woke up and felt bad again. Although I didn’t feel as bad as when it started, I had no energy at all. I didn't have shortness of breath, or pneumonia, but when I climbed the stairs to the second floor, I was winded. And usually, I can take those stairs two steps at a time.
A couple of days after I got sick, Erica (Lin's other daughter) got sick, and she got tested for covid right away, but by the time her test results came back it was another five or six days. So it was that next weekend after I got sick that Erica found out she was positive for covid.
Then, the Monroe Health Department did contract tracing with Erica, and they called me and said they were going to come over the next day and test me. That was on a Monday, about 10 days after I'd first gotten sick. By then my fever had finally gone away. It had lasted from Friday through the following Sunday. The Health Department took the test and it came back negative.
Now, that could have just been a false negative, I found out later. The tests were not very reliable. But then the Health Department told me I would have to be isolated for another two weeks, and I was just dejected. Oh my God! For three-and-a-half weeks, I was alone, trying to get well, and feeling a little better, but completely alone. That part was really hard. I figured if I was going to stay sane, I needed a schedule, and that became a little CNN on TV, some work on a jigsaw puzzle, talking to friends on the phone, and lots of reading.
By the time I was released out of those three-and-a-half weeks of isolation, two weeks from that Monday that the Monroe Health Department came and tested me, it was April 6th. I did go out for a little walk that day, it was fine. I went out in the morning, and I felt fine. The next day, Tuesday, I stayed around the house, and I just felt so good that I was free.
On Wednesday, the 8th, I took another, longer walk, and my blood pressure must have just dropped, and I passed out. I have atrial fibrillation, so that may have been in play during my walk, but I hadn't been experiencing any symptoms for a couple of weeks. I guess I shouldn’t have been out for a walk that soon. I had no idea. And neither did anybody else. None of the doctors said to me, you better take it easy, because they just didn't know, then, that the virus was going to be that penetrating. What they told me later is that the virus lingers and also, your recuperation is not swift.
Lin collapsed in front of a neighbor's house, wrenching her foot as she fainted, and the neighbor called 911. The ambulance came, and the EMTs treated Lin in the ambulance before driving her to the hospital. Her heart rate had shot up to over 200 BPM, and at one point while she was in the ambulance, the EMTs couldn’t find a pulse and had to administer cardioversion, twice. The next thing she knew, Lin was in the emergency room.
During the three days she spent in the hospital, Lin’s foot was causing her major discomfort. They gave her another COVID-19 test and x-rayed her foot. On the second day, she learned from one of the nurses that she was COVID-19 positive and had broken her foot in three places.
When Lin first came home from the hospital with the boot for her broken foot, she wasn’t able to stay alone. Her daughters were alternating sleeping overnight in her house to help manage Lin's care. Initially, they were preparing meals for her, when she couldn’t walk at all. Eventually, she gained limited mobility with a walker.
When I interviewed her about her coronavirus experience, Lin's foot had healed to the point that she was able to fend for herself at home. Today, she’s off the walker and her foot and her comfort are improving every day.
I asked if she's found anything about the quarantine that‘s positive, and she said that when the Monroe County Health Department told her she had to stay quarantined for two more weeks, after already being alone for 10-11 days, she was very unhappy, but she had made the best of it by going inside of herself and practicing meditation, along with the other activities she described above.
What she missed the most was her grandchildren. "I ached to see them," she said. When she was ill and couldn’t see them, and before she could walk, she connected with them through video chat. Every week they picked a day, and she read them chapters from a chapter book, via Facetime. On another day of the week, she did an art project with them through Facetime. She said it was sad, not being able to have them sleep over or watch movies sitting next to them with her arm around them.
She also missed going to restaurants or going to venues and listening to music. She doesn’t see herself doing that anytime soon. She thinks life will eventually return to normal, but it will be some time, and she's concerned that there could be a second wave of the coronavirus in the fall.
Finally, Lin misses not feeling like herself or being able to walk freely. When her foot is completely healed, Lin said she wants to dance. She wants to put music on and dance, in her house, in her driveway.