Monday 3rd January 2022. My 19-year-old son wakes up and says his throat hurts. He feels like he is `coming down with something’. He was out all weekend celebrating NYE. As we are living in the time of Covid, we all put masks on. I bring out the only RAT we have which produces a faint pink line. We are unsure whether it means he is negative or positive for Covid.
Monday is the New Year’s Day public holiday so not all PCR testing sites are open. My husband decides to drive my son to a local PCR testing site while I put on some gloves and a mask and start disinfecting the house. The queues are hours long everywhere they go. After two hours, they decide to come home and test the next day. My son goes straight to bed, feverish. My daughter feels asthmatic. Later that day my son receives a text from the friends he was with on New Year’s Eve. They’ve tested positive for Covid.
This is a scary moment as I’m immunocompromised. I have already taken my medication for the week. I’m at peak immunosuppression and living with what seems to be a positive Covid person but we are all vaccinated and hoping for the best. We divide the rooms so that I am the furthest away from the others. I will be sleeping in the study, adjacent to the kitchen. There’s also a second toilet in the laundry that I can use. I become the sole cook, the only person allowed in the kitchen.
We retire to our rooms to isolate. We rely on FaceTime and yelling for chats. We are sweltering in the summer heat because we can’t put on the air conditioning. My husband and I search the internet for Rapid Antigen Tests (RATs) but they are sold out everywhere. There are none available online.
We decide to test the next day, Tuesday, in separate locations. The family leave for one location at 6.30am to queue for a testing site that opens at 7am, when they arrive, there are already 50 cars ahead of them. Meanwhile I walk to the West Footscray Co-Health and stand in the queue outside the building from 8am, ready for when they open at 9.15am. There are at least 30-40 people ahead of me, I can’t tell as the queue curves around an alley to the back of the car park behind the building. People are coming from everywhere and lining up behind me. Fortunately, Co-Health open an hour early. It’s becoming clear that NYE was a super spreader event.
My turn comes and I inform the staff that I am on immunotherapy, and they mark my test as urgent. As I leave the testing centre, I pop into the chemist next door. They have just reopened from the holidays. I ask if they have RATs and they say no but put my name on a list.
I text a friend to ask, “Where can I get a cake delivered to my house?” Tomorrow, is my birthday. She’s in the city waiting to get her Covid booster and offers to pick up a lemon tart for me from Brunetti. After waiting two hours in the queue, she picks up my tart and drops it off on the porch. My neighbour picks up some groceries and drops them off in the front yard along with some cupcakes for my birthday. I receive a text message from Co-Health about 9pm. I’m negative.
I wake up on Wednesday and make myself a birthday coffee. My daughter is still feeling asthmatic, but her PCR test result comes through as negative. There is a staggering 17,636 Covid cases announced. News reports throughout the day are full of stories of people unable to buy RATs with some businesses inflating the price of kits.
I read a news report that a very faint pink line on a RAT is still a positive. I muck around with my iPhone edit function and a photo I took of my son’s RAT test. With the different settings the test line is clearer, showing a positive result for Covid. A friend tells me that Melbourne Pathology is a week behind on all testing and has shut down temporarily to clear the tests. By the end of the week some of these tests will no longer be valid as too much time will have elapsed from collection and people will have to retest. A friend tells me her child waited in a queue for a PCR test for eight hours.
We order Malaysian for my birthday dinner. I take a selfie of my family and I, on the decking, all of us masked and socially distancing. Unbelievably, as the family sing `Happy Birthday’, it starts raining heavily – great big raindrops loudly hitting the roof of the veranda. It’s end times. We laugh hysterically.
It’s Thursday. My phone wakes me. The chemist has rung. My RATs have arrived. I get up and immediately feel strange. My throat feels sore. My joints ache and I feel feverish. Is it Covid, or is my arthritis starting to flare from the stress and exhaustion of the last few days? I decide to walk down to the chemist, to enjoy the fresh air and listen to music. I pick up my RATs and walk home. I’m still feeling warm, but it is a hot day and I have been walking and drinking coffee.
By the time I get home, my husband has received his PCR results. Negative. But, since it’s been 72 hours since our PCR tests we decide, to re-test ourselves. We stand around the kitchen bench with our masks on while our youngest inserts a swab into the back of her throat and both nostrils. She puts three drops on the test and the pink mark comes up positive. She has Covid. Now I must test myself. The line for my test is strong and appears almost instantly. There is no doubt about the result. My husband goes out on to the decking in the backyard, sits down and takes his test. He brings it back in and puts it on the bench with ours. We are all positive. We’ve avoided catching Covid for two years but now the virus is in us. We all take our masks off and finally put on the air conditioner. We can come out of our rooms.
That night, I read posts in Facebook groups from worried people seeking RATs. A neighbour asks our WhatsApp Street group if anyone has a spare RAT, her two-year-old twins are sick. One twin has been diagnosed with pneumonia.
I struggle to sleep that night. I worry irrationally the minute I go to sleep the virus will take over. My only defence is to stay awake. At 3.30am, I take a sleeping tablet and brace myself for the next day. But when I wake the next day, Friday, I’m relieved to feel the same. Two Panadol for the pain and I feel fine, but tired. Thank goodness for vaccines. My husband, who says he feels like he has a mild head cold, takes control of the cooking. “Happy Anniversary” I say. We’ve been married 21 years.
My GP rings and tells me about a new antibody infusion called Sotrovimab. It has an 85 per cent success rate at keeping vulnerable people out of hospital and out of ICU. I’m booked in for the following day. At this stage I’m feeling well but when I wake up the next day, I’ve gotten worse. I feel sleepy, congested in my chest, blocked noise, achy joints. I can no longer smell or taste anything. I’m coughing a lot. A little bit of panic creeps in. I am grateful that I will be having an antibody infusion. The DHHS figures come through, 51,356 cases PCR and RAT combined.
I arrive at the hospital and tell the security guard at the hospital gate, that I have Covid and here for treatment. “God bless you”, he says. I am the only person in the treatment car park. I ring a number and a nurse in full PPE comes to my car and escorts me inside to an empty room where a chair has been set up in the corner. The infusion is meant to take 30 minutes, but it takes 40 minutes for the two nurses to find a vein that will accept a drip. My veins have shrunk from Covid. They try five places on both arms. The next day, my arms will be covered in dark purple bruises from the needles. Eventually they get a catheter in, the transfusion can begin. One of the nurses is also immunocompromised and asks if I could email her and let her know if I feel better.
I receive a text message from CarePathway, an initiative from health providers in my area who provide care remotely. Over the next five days, they text every day to monitor my symptoms. I go home and rest. The nurse has told me it will take at least a day to feel better. I lie in bed all day watching `The Golden Girls’. My son is feeling better and is out of bed for the first time since Monday, hanging out in the kitchen and gaming with friends. When I wake up the next day, Sunday, I feel better.
On Monday, I email the nurse at the hospital.
“Hi J, thanks for looking after me. I feel better”.
Each day I improve until Day Seven, when I wake up coughing heavily and feeling dizzy. My CarePathway provider send a text telling me to call an ambulance if I haven’t heard from them within 30 minutes. Ninety minutes go past, and still no call. As I don’t feel better, I decide to go to the local hospital where I am bundled off to a section of the hospital reserved for Covid patients. Two paramedics bring in an elderly Greek man. We sit in chairs opposite each other chatting in Greek, through our masks. A mobile X-ray unit comes around and x-rays our chests while we are sitting on our chairs. We have blood tests performed.
An hour later, a doctor arrives and tells the old Greek man a bed has been found for him and helps him onto a wheelchair. As he is wheeled past me, he waves to me, and I wave back. My hospital doctor returns and tells me I am good to go. I am over the hump and no longer in danger.
