THROUGH ‘THE STORM’
Dentist overcomes COVID-19 in time for Mother’s Day in Memphis
“The storm.” h That’s what Brittany Baum, a 29-year-old Memphisborn-and-raised dentist, calls her experience in New York with COVID-19. h “I’m not a person who complains a lot, and I’m not a hypochondriac by any means, but when ‘the storm’ came, that’s what I call it, that’s when I knew I was sick,” she said. h “You hear about all the different symptoms people have at different times, but for me, it was like a three-hour period where everything hit me all at once, like a storm.” Of course, there was no shelter from this particular storm. The rain, hail and lightning that accompanied it came in the form of fever, pain and a suffocating cough. it hit March 20. h At the start of the evening, Baum felt fine, but at about 9 p.m., “My face just lit on fire,” she said.
“I started coughing so much I was having a really hard time breathing. My body was hurting so much I couldn’t move. And I was so hot I had to take off all my clothes and lay on my wooden floor.”
The sickness lasted two weeks. Now, Baum is safely ensconced in her parents’ East Memphis home, and reunited with her mom, just in time for Mother’s Day.
This Mother’s Day already was expected to be especially poignant, because Baum’s grandmother, Tillaya Lusky, had died Dec. 21 at the age of 82.
“I already knew I wanted to be with my mom for Mother’s Day, because it’s her first Mother’s Day without her mother,” Baum said.
But Baum’s life-threatening experience with coronavirus further reinforced the mother-daughter bond.
“It was such a scary time, and there’s nothing you can do,” said Brittany Baum’s mother, Shelby Baum, 56. “We would try to talk on Facetime, and it was so horrible to watch. Your emotions go all over the place. We were terrified.”
Baum has emerged from her personal crisis with a message that is not unique to her experiences but nonetheless seems to be too often ignored.
“People still seem to think if you’re young and healthy, you won’t get it,” she said. “I’m here to say that you can definitely get sick, very, very sick.
“I’ve never smoked and I had none of the underlying conditions and I never expected to be affected in this way. I thought, ‘It’s not going to happen to me,’ but I was very, very wrong.”
‘Everything in my body hurt’
A graduate of Ridgeway High School and the University of Maryland who attended dental school at New York University, Baum was in the midst of a yearlong dental residency program at Mount Sinai Hospital in New York when she became ill.
“It’s a really awesome experience,” she said of the residency program. “You work in the dental clinic, so you see patients for regular dentistry, and emergencies, and you’re on call, and you do different rotations with pediatrics and anesthesia.”
At the hospital, Baum worked with many different types of patients. She also had her temperature taken daily and observed the hospital’s strict health protocols, which have been heightened in the wake of a pandemic that has been especially deadly in New York.
In fact, “By the time I got sick, we were only seeing patients for emergencies, and we had every type of PPE (personal protective equipment). I felt very protected. My hospital has always been amazing with protecting all of us.”
Baum does not know where she was infected with the virus (“In New York, so many people have it, it could have been anywhere, the grocery store, who knows”). In any event, on March 20, when she returned to the Midtown Manhattan apartment she shares with Alycia Giambalvo, a radiology technician at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, she became suddenly severely ill with what the women recognized as COVID-19.
“I woke up to her literally on the floor, trying to breathe and gasping for air,” said Giambalvo, who had fallen into a “deep sleep” the previous night, before the arrival of Baum’s “storm.”
“It just hit out of nowhere,” said Giambalvo, 29, a native of Boca Raton, Florida.
The women went to a hospital emergency room, where Baum was tested, received a chest X-ray, and so on. She did not need to be put on a ventilator, and she was not hospitalized. Doctors from the hospital called to check on her every day after she returned home.
Unsurprisingly, Giambalvo also was infected with the coronavirus. She said she suffered from “achiness in my spine” and chills; but because her case never became severe, she was able to function as Baum’s nurse for the next couple of weeks as the self-quarantined roommates tried to beat the virus.
Giambalvo said Baum’s fever fluctuated between about 100 and 102 degrees.
“I would say I had a fever for about 11 days straight, and it never broke,” said Baum. “I couldn’t even walk anywhere in my apartment because I didn’t have enough breath and energy.
“I had like four ice packs on my body at all time. I would lay on my stomach to help my breathing. My body hurt so much, everything in my body hurt. I went without sleeping several nights because I was in so much pain. I don’t think I showered for like two weeks, which is pretty gross, but I didn’t have enough strength.”
Said Giambalvo: “Overall I keep a very calm composure because of the things I see on a daily basis (at the cancer center).
“But I will say there was one day she did get me a little on edge, because of the way she was breathing, I got pretty nervous.”
Baum also lost her sense of smell and taste for two weeks, a development that, in retrospect, amused her friends.
“It was funny because I really love food and I love eating, so when people found out I couldn’t taste, they said it must have been hard for me. But I have say it was unimportant to me at the time because for the first time in my whole life, I didn’t care about eating.” What she did eat, mostly, was bread and soup — but it was high-quality bread from her favorite Memphis bakery, Ricki’s Cookie Corner & Bakery in Eastgate, delivered in care packages from her parents.
No wonder Baum calls her family “Memphis strong.” (In addition to her parents, Lee and Shelby Baum, her three surviving grandparents live in the city.) “Thank God I have the best parents on Earth,” she said. “They were trying to come to New York to help take care of me, I was threatening them, ‘Stay where you are. I will not let you in my apartment.’”
Giambalvo said she did not leave the apartment for 16 days straight. Baum’s temperature dropped and the pain went away after about two weeks, but it took her another week to “feel like myself.” No longer contagious, she was able to leave home and return to work.
If there is a silver lining to the experience, it manifested itself in Baum’s blood, which now contains a high antibody count, making it valuable in the treatment of patients hospitalized with COVID-19. As a result, Baum has donated plasma, to help fight the disease.
Baum returned to work with a renewed appreciation for the “amazing things” going on at her hospital. “All the doctors, and how hard-working they are. And every time a COVID patient is discharged, they play ‘Here Comes the Sun’ over the PA system, so everyone can applaud and cheer. I cried happy tears, it was such a beautiful thing to see.”
She also cried happy tears Monday, when she saw her parents again, after driving from New York to Memphis. (”I drove to avoid any more human contact than necessary. It’s always great to take more precautions.”)
“It’s such a tricky time,” Baum said, referring to calls to “reopen” America. “Obviously, I care about the economy, but I want to encourage people to take this seriously. I come from a densely populated place that was greatly affected, but even if you don’t know someone who was affected, you should take it seriously.”
Giambalvo said her roommate’s experience “opened my eyes to the fact that nobody can get away from it. A lot of people think because they’re young and healthy they’ll be fine, but that might not be the case.”
As for people who compare COVID-19 to the flu, Baum said: “Compared to my experience, the flu is like the nicest vacation you’ve ever been on.”