A frontliner’s fight is also her family’s
My sister’s Covid-19 fight also became our own
My sister, a nurse, was all packed Monday morning, ready for her weekly shift, when she got the call that she tested positive for Covid-19.
The first thing I did was hold it in. I’ve been writing articles circling around the pandemic for two months, even trying to interview someone an hour before we got the news, so it was an everyday routine to dwell on all of the disease’s uncomfortable facts.
I’ve written enough tribute for doctors who have sadly succumbed to the disease.
She was high risk, I knew, even with the PPE she wore at work—and we should have seen it coming.
An hour later my dad was escorting her to the ambulance and my mom was crying hard.
On the front line Mickaela, or “Ate Mick,” as the whole family would call her, is a 25-year-old nurse at UP-Philippine General Hospital. She is the eldest in the family.
Ever since the community quarantine started, she had been working away from home. She was reassigned to the Covid ward and intensive care only a few days after our dog died.
I could only imagine her struggle to work under tense circumstances while grieving for our dog. It must have been a lot of internal fight.
A week later, she was swabbed for Covid-19 and was asked to stay at La Concordia College on Pedro Gil, a makeshift isolation center for health workers converted by the Manila government. When a lot of her colleagues started leaving the isolation center after self-quarantine, she was asked to follow suit.
It never occurred to us it was a bad idea—we knew she had never been this exhausted in her entire life and she just wanted to come home.
With my sister around, our house was mostly just filled with banters of don’t-touch-me’s and don’t-comenear-me’s, and “subtle” distancing in close quarters. We tried to check for symptoms Ate Mick might be showing, and she made sure to never go out but, in hindsight, we realize those weren’t enough precautions.
We would still watch Netflix together side by side, eat on the same table, act as if doing the bare minimum would save us when, in fact, they were counterproductive. It didn’t help that we thought that her youth would have spared her from getting infected. Imagine the look on our faces when we found out she was asymptomatic.
These cases are not rare—almost 50 percent of carriers are asymptomatic, according to CDC—and they impose a greater risk due to the unwitting process of transmission.
They seem presumably well, but they could be infecting people with weaker immunity.
Hell week
The first couple of days after Ate was confined were tough. I had seen the cases rise, with my sister,