What the past Taught Me about Living With COVID-19
Resilience is hereditary. My ancestors knew what it meant to live through struggle. It got me through my exposure to COVID-19.
It was a Sunday night during the first weeks of the pandemic. My husband and I had been watching the news most of the evening after dinner, while our toddler son played with his toys next to us. It was almost time for us to bring him up to bed. Then came the phone call.
“Oh my God. Are you serious?” my husband said into the phone. “Now what do we have to do?” He began to pace around the living room.
It was the children’s hospital where our son had surgery three days prior. We were told we had a high risk of exposure to COVID-19 by someone who had directly cared for our son.
We asked if we could be tested. We were told we couldn’t be tested if we weren’t experiencing symptoms, and that even then procuring enough tests was proving to be difficult for the hospital. We had to quarantine.
The beginning of the pandemic
It was the first week of March, and COVID-19 was just beginning to take hold of the world. The terms “social distancing” and “quarantine” were brand new to the general public. Many politicians, including the President of the United States, were still calling the pandemic a hoax.
My son’s surgery was at a children’s hospital in Seattle. He had been through the same surgery before. Several times in fact. After arriving at the hospital on surgery day we sanitized our hands as we usually did during each visit. There were no plastic partitions separating people. No one was wearing masks. No one was social distancing yet. Everything we know about the virus today was just a suspicion at that point. Everyone was still trying to figure out how exactly it was spreading, and the true potential of the virus’ veracity was still unknown.
The surgery went according to plan. While my son had experienced post-surgery complications in the past, there was thankfully none this time.
During the three days after surgery we had been out-and-about, unknowingly and potentially exposing others to the virus. I had taken my son grocery shopping at a few different stores, just trying to collect a few pantry essentials from stores’ dwindling inventories. We also went to a frozen yogurt bar, visited our old landlords (we were in the middle of a move), and stopped to get coffee on two separate occasions.
The days that followed the phone call from the hospital were filled with with dreaded unknown. An uneasy feeling ran through me with every throat tickle that I experienced, every sneeze, and every tiny ache or pain. I would think, “Is this it? It is finally starting to happen?”
I was constantly checking to see if my sense of smell or taste were diminishing. I took my temperature, along with my son, once every couple of hours. I tried to deduce whether my headaches were the result of stress, or an early symptom of what was inevitably to come.
My anxiety was in overdrive. What if my son got sick? What if my husband got sick? What if we all got sick? Would we know when it was time to go to the hospital? Would the hospital even have room for us?
I worried about what it would be like caring for our sick son while being sick ourselves. There would be no reprieve, no one we could call on to help us. We would be on our own.
Perseverance is a family trait
Fourteen days eventually passed since our initial exposure, and none of us showed a single symptom. I tried to get us COVID-19 antibody tests in the weeks that followed, but our health insurance wouldn’t allow it because the tests weren’t FDA approved.
Now, after almost a year of self-isolation and social distancing, even as the world experiences its worst surge in cases yet, there remains a sense of hope.
I’ve recently been reflecting on memories of stories told to me by my grandparents and great-grandparents. About life during the Great Depression and World War II. My grandmother survived polio as a young child. Both of my grandfathers made it through the Korean War. My husband’s great-grandmother spent several years of her childhood in an Indonesian concentration camp. Countless ancestors left homelands in Germany, Scotland, Italy, and Poland to start new lives in America.
I often thought to myself, how did they live through it? What must it have been like? It all feels so relatable now. They knew what it meant to take one day at a time, and adapt in order to survive. They lived it.
I look at their faces in black and white photographs, searching for more than just familial resemblance. I analyze their eyes, with their stares steeled by years of hardship and struggle, and their faces eager and resolute.
My future grandchildren may look at me and wonder why grandma always has a half dozen bottles of Lysol sanitizing spray beneath her sink, or why she methodically wipes down groceries before they can be used. They may roll their eyes when I tell them the reason I keep a year’s worth of extra toilet paper in the linen closet is because someday it could be used as social currency.
I will tell them about surviving the pandemic and our near brush with COVID-19, and hopefully they will remember the most important aspect of it all: that we lived through it.
Ashley Riley is a video creator, writer, and stay-at-home wife and mother. She has earned a Bachelor’s in political science and a Master’s in social policy. She films and edits videos capturing life and family in the Pacific Northwest, which you can subscribe to here.
