Rollin’ with the Rona
Living and taking care of a sick parent is something many of us will either go through or have already experienced. They tell us it’s part of growing up, but it doesn’t always mean it’s easy. For my family, the experience involves daily anxieties of ensuring that the surrounding home environment is clean and being managed like a makeshift hospital. As a result, everyone in the house had to follow and practice safe hygiene: wash your hands, sanitize, remove your shoes and keep your distance. There are sanitizers at the door prior to entering my father’s room to hammer the point over the importance of being sanitized before going in. Sometimes people take offense to this, and as some of you can imagine it can be misconstrued as being rude.
And this was all pre-Corona.
When your parent is extremely vulnerable to any type of virus and is infection prone, a cough or a sneeze could prove to be detrimental. So, I can safely say I gave people side eyes when they coughed or sneezed during a visit long before Corona days. You can’t blame me. Your anxiety levels are always through the roof in this situation.
Now, overlay that with a global pandemic that disproportionately affects the elderly and tends to move around in people without showing symptoms, you basically have a cocktail of emotions with some serious doses of stress, worry, dread and anxiety. Each day you kind of hope that the Rona (COVID-19) doesn’t walk through the front door. Each day, fueled by streams of information and updates on Twitter and the news on the million ways you can catch the Rona, you continue to hope and pray that today isn’t the day a mishap happens, and someone comes home with symptoms.
The truth is, you do everything you can, educate the folks at home, educate family members and relatives, and educate yourself. You can put up all the WHO posters you can find on the internet around your house. You make everyone in the house wear masks and put restrictions on visitors, and limit leaving the house. I was lucky to have been able to work from home since Tanzania’s first reported case in March. I was barely leaving the house…
One thing this entire pandemic has taught me to date, and I’m sure there are more learnings ahead, is that there are things you can control and there are things you simply cannot; human behavior and when shit happens.
It’s not until you go for a normal run on a beautiful Sunday afternoon and slip on a pile of mud and fall flat on your face and realize how powerful that simple reminder is, shit just happens.
I started having symptoms two days after my fall from grace. Nagging cough, feeling a bit fatigued but still ok enough to work and act like a normal human being. Given the fact that I am living with a national treasure and realizing that I’m probably a threat to national security, I decided to self-isolate and monitor myself almost immediately.
Like many people around the world, I started checking my temperature profusely. I studied in the US, so seeing numbers like 35, 36, 37.8 meant nothing to me. So, every time I’d check, particularly over the first few days, I had to Google and calculate from Celsius to Fahrenheit.
Things got a bit hectic by Friday. I felt cold and feverish, my temperature was 38 (100 degrees, right?), and my cough was a full blown Gwyneth Paltrow Contagion cough. Friends and family mobilized all the medication needed, paracetamol (everyone’s best friend), antibiotics, vitamin C pills, cough syrup, eucalyptus to steam and air my lungs (yes that’s a thing), and chocolate for extra measure. That last one didn’t help because, I couldn’t taste the chocolate (Shit…isn’t that a proper Corona symptom?!). Speaking of food and eating, I had to stop fasting the moment I started getting sick despite Ramadhan being one of my favorite months. I stopped having coffee, which is always a serious tell. And in the first five days of being sick, I lost more weight than my first full week of fasting. The Corona Workout Plan…I knew I was in trouble.
By the end of the week I’d been hydrating as much as I could, but the taste of water was terrible. I had had at least four cups of ginger tea each day; didn’t help. The cough was still aggressive and my temperature was hovering on the high side of 37. I started to get in my own head. Maybe too much hot tea is increasing my temperature?
By Mother’s Day, I could barely muster a Happy Mother’s Day to my dear mum. That night, at about 3am, I woke up in a bout of sweat, as if I’d been running 10k. That same morning, I checked my temperature…38…maybe it’s not the tea.
By Monday I told myself I had to get tested. I was quite thankful to friends and colleagues that encouraged me to get checked out. For some reason, I still thought I should just remain isolated and let things pass. Tuesday morning came around and the same thing. At 3am, I woke up in a bout of sweat, this time as if I went swimming at the beach. Temperature 38.2.
So, on Tuesday I drove my weak ass self to the IST Clinic to get tested for COVID-19. The staff and team at IST were professional and great. Process didn’t take too long and as uncomfortable as it was (no one likes a cue-tip being shoved into your nose) things went pretty smoothly. I didn’t anticipate being put under a drip for the next few hours on that day, but thanks to the doctors and staff, they saw that I didn’t look well. My oxygen saturation levels were not normal, less than 95 and touching on 91. Blood work was taken to rule out any other potential diseases such as Malaria, came back negative.
I continued to stay isolated entertaining myself on Netflix, watching affluent middle-aged white women drinking their sorrows in some sunny location in the US, while mistakenly murdering people (Dead to Me, pretty entertaining show).
By Friday, I had gone to the clinic for another round of blood work but also had a feeling I’d probably find out my test results. I had a feeling I’d be positive. The doctor came to me after I’d waited for some time for my blood results and let me know that I had tested positive for COVID-19. In my typical nerdy and awkward self, I responded, “Ok, thanks.”
After a few seconds of processing what just happened, I had asked the doctor a few questions about what I needed to do and if there is anything I need to do different. He had mentioned that the first week is always the toughest and so far I’d managed well considering there were no breathing issues and my lungs seemed fine. Regardless, I’d have to continue to isolate for another week and then get tested again. I was definitely lucky.
There is something pretty tragic about COVID-19 that you probably do not realize until either yourself or a loved one goes through it. Remember the concoction of emotions I mentioned? This virus does test your emotional spirit. Perhaps not everyone, but for my family, when one is sick, being physically present and being close is the first sign of caring. In fact, we are that family that crowds the ICU and have other people frown on us…we don’t discriminate either, we pull this stunt in Tanzania, the US and the UK. But with COVID-19, you really have to isolate and be on your own; you just can’t risk infecting your loved ones, you may have to yell at those who are caring for you to stay away. Being alone at your most vulnerable, will protect those you care about.
I’m slowly on the mend, and thankful to my friends, colleagues and family for the calls and video messages and care packages. A big shout-out to Christina Applegate for making me feel that living with the Rona isn’t as bad as the lives of the privileged characters in Dead to Me. Although I probably should have just watched The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air.
Corona is too real folks and Cardi B was right.
