An antibody test confirmed what I already knew:
Shortly after my husband returned from Europe, we both fell ill with COVID-19. Neither of us were critically ill, and we suffered from what seems like a more common experience with the virus. So, in true Blush fashion, I had to write about it and offer my insights. Here’s my advice for how to handle COVID-19.
In my mind, there was a slim chance my husband wasn’t going to come home infected.
He had been working in a few hotspots in France, and then had recently made the transition to Ireland before any precautions were being taken. He’s also the world’s biggest extrovert – so at any given chance, he likes to be in big groups. Plus, in order to board his flight home after production shutdown, he had to wait in a cramped line for four hours without any sort of mask or gloves to stop the spread.
So, yeah, it felt inevitable.
This was March 16th – at what felt like the exact moment America started to take this thing seriously and shutdown. This was also around the time that grocery stores had a hard time keeping up with demand and toilet paper was a hot commodity to be traded on the black market.
Therefore – I was not as prepared as I would have liked to have been. My weekend grocery trip was less than fruitful.
I made it mandatory that we quarantined the second he got home. He had been gone for five months, so quarantining in separate rooms was out of the question, but we at least were ahead of it in that sense.
I’m going to detail day by dayish as to how this virus progressed for anyone who is curious.
I know there’s so much anxiety and uncertainty about what happens when infected – and while again, Andrew and I did not have a severe case – I hope I can alleviate some nerves.
I also want to make it clear that….
1) We did our best to get our hands on a test. We spent hours on the phone with our insurance provider, our PCP, Cedars Sinai, the CDC…you name it, we tried it. At the time Los Angeles was short on tests, so only those who were healthcare workers or lived in nursing homes were able to be tested. There wasn’t much we could do.
And 2) Since we could not get a test, I couldn’t be sure we had it at the time. I’m going to walk you through my inner monologue so you can see when I doubted we had the virus (even with the knowledge that he had been in a hot spot!) and when we knew for sure it was COVID.
**This in NO WAY is trying to diminish the severity of COVID-19 or the necessary steps taken in order to slow its spread. In fact, I hope it does the opposite. While Andrew and I were lucky, there are others who did not and will not survive this virus. Please take others’ health as seriously as you do your own**
Here were our symptoms:
Day 1-3: Fever, chills, fatigue, brain fog, body aches, headaches.
Andrew ran a temperature of just over 100 – so it