This Side of the Pond

The pandemic has always seemed comfortingly far away here in Crook County. Halfway up a mountain, safe in our small towns, few of us know anyone who’s been diagnosed with the dreaded virus – right?

Well, if you’re reading these words, now you do. I am the sixteenth identified case of COVID-19 in this county.

I caught the virus despite not having left Sundance since March. Despite having avoided almost every gathering and large event.

Despite staying away from public meetings and doing everything I could to keep on top of the news through online means. Despite being able to count the number of locations I’ve visited since this all began on one hand.

Despite wearing a mask as much as possible when I’ve left the safety of my home and place of work. I did all this because I believed in the idea that I was helping to keep our businesses and schools open.

I probably did help, in the almost imperceptible way that one person can make a difference. But for my own health, it wasn’t enough.

Nor did I breeze through this experience without suffering any symptoms. As I write this, I have spent several days unable to walk further than the distance between sofa and bed, with an oximeter clipped to my finger watching for my blood oxygen levels to drop below the danger point.

They came very close. I’d been told that days four to seven were the ones to watch out for, and there I was on day seven with a reading that hung perilously over a line I didn’t want to cross, because crossing it meant calling the hospital for help.

Whoever came up with the description “mild symptoms” may want to have another think about their vocabulary skills, because this is not a fun disease even for those of us who avoid needing medical help. Days of feeling like death warmed up are accompanied by the fear of not knowing what’s coming next.

It’s a frightening virus because there is no way to predict what will happen. I couldn’t know if I’d be one of the lucky ones who recover with little sign I’d been ill. Every change in symptom was accompanied by the worry that I might be in that tiny percentage of people who don’t make it out the other side.

I started feeling just a tiny bit unwell a couple of days after the person who infected me said they were experiencing symptoms. They weren’t convinced it was the coronavirus, but had isolated themselves just in case.

This was a person I couldn’t have avoided if I’d wanted to, and therein lies my point: I did things as close to the book as I could, but neither I nor the person who infected me could control what everyone else was doing.

My mask only protects other people from my potential germs, it doesn’t keep anyone else’s germs at bay. Staying six feet back from people only works if they stay six feet away from me.

I went home from work the next day and closed the door behind me, determined to have no contact with anyone until I knew whether I really had been exposed. Everything seemed fine through the weekend, so I was almost convinced my symptoms were seasonal allergies.

But then, on Sunday afternoon, the news came: I had been exposed. This certainly explained why I nearly fell flat on my face while painting a wall. I called the hospital and was asked to come down so I could be tested.

I still didn’t really think I would test positive. Once the swab had been jammed far enough up my nostrils to make my eyes water, one of our lovely doctors came out to chat with me about my predicament. He was wearing a mask and keeping back from my car.

When he came back out with my results a few minutes later, he was dressed in head-to-toe protective gear. No prizes for guessing what news he was about to impart.

From that moment on, it was a waiting game. Waiting to feel better, or to feel worse. Waiting to see if my body would keep getting the oxygen it needed, or if I would need help to keep breathing.

Perhaps the worst of it is that I’m still not safe – nobody knows how long my immunity to the virus will last. Assuming I am immune at all, as there have been cases of COVID-19 resurfacing in the same patient. The best medical advice is to assume I’m perfectly capable of catching this thing all over again – and I can tell you that I have no desire to ever repeat this experience.

I want to express my appreciation for the medical staff at our hospital and the folks at Public Health for their kindness during my experience. It was made clear that they were ready and waiting to help me if I needed it, and there’s nothing more comforting while you’re waiting for the Sword of Damocles to drop.

I’m telling you about my diagnosis because it brought home to me that Crook County is not untouchable. The virus is here in our community, potentially more widespread than we’d like to think (especially with the surge in cases we’ve seen over the last week), and it’s possible to catch it even when you think you’re doing everything right.

All we have to fight this thing is a few flimsy pieces of material and our ability to measure short distances by eye. Those are our best and only tools to keep each other safe.

You won’t keep yourself safe, I’m afraid – I’m (thankfully) living proof of that. You’ll need to rely on everyone around you making use of those same tools.

Pandemic life is boring, and frustrating, and inconvenient, and annoying. It’s stopping us from doing the things we want to do and I will never downplay how badly it has affected people’s livelihoods. But that’s why we all need to work together to make it go away.

The next time you wonder if you really do need to wear that mask, I ask you to please look at it this way: the person who infected me has no idea where they contracted this illness. Someone out there, likely within this county, spread the virus to both of us without ever knowing they had it, and they will never know that they were once both infected and infectious.

That someone could even be you.