Covid-19 takes over my life

DR MICHAELA BOTES

I SIT on the couch looking at my results with blurry eyes.

Crying non-stop. My husband slowly walks down the stairs with worry in his voice and asks if I’m okay. He puts on his mask. I tell him: “It’s positive.”

Our lives change. A few days earlier, I was sweating through my clothes, drenched, and woke with a sore throat. I called my supervisor because my screening test said I should. Together we decided it would not be too bad if I came to work, but my gut feel told me I shouldn’t.

A few hours later I called him to say I wouldn’t be doing my night shift. I showered and made my way to the hospital where I was tested. The long swab placed deep into my nasal passages to swab the nasopharynx was enough to make it sting as the tears ran down your face.

After getting my sick note, which booked me off for three days while I waited for my results, I made my way back home. I was positive that the test would be negative. I didn’t even work with any Covid positive patients. I felt bad for putting my team at work under more pressure – all for nothing.

Over the next few days I found myself convinced it was nothing. Because I’m a doctor, I had access to my own test results, which I checked on every hour or so.

Then I found out that a nursing sister I worked with in a certain ward had also tested positive, and boy, did the tension in my shoulders rise.

I had so many thoughts: medical aid only starts in August, my husband doesn’t have medical aid, I have no family here. What if my husband gets sick? Then it happened.

The disbelief when I saw the positive result… I was waiting to post a funny meme about how I finally failed a test because my coronavirus test came back negative. But then, another test, I somehow managed to pass.

I migrated to the downstairs room, removed all contaminated bedding and started washing everything with Jik and hot water. Colleagues were calling me, and of course I had to fill in a list of all the people I had been in contact with. It was a long list of patients, nurses, doctors. How many people did I put at risk?

I had been walking around oblivious to the fact that I could be a statistic – one of the numbers you hear on the news.

Who would have thought that in my first year of internship I would face a pandemic never mind be infected by it?

Do I know which patient gave it to me and if that patient has been tested?

Is that patient out there, unknowingly infecting others? I don’t know.

I’m lying in this room alone, no contact with my husband or dogs, wiping door knobs and using separate dishes and towels and soap, and spring-cleaning the bathroom before and after I use it. I wash my clothes last now and hang them separately, but I struggle to breathe doing it.

I turn in pain every night as the body aches wake me.

I am using over-the-counter medication and every homemade remedy, because you know brown paper will cure respiratory illness, LOL. My husband drops my plate of food at the door, he refuses to sleep upstairs so far away from me, so he set up camp on the couch where he can check on me every hour or so.

We video-call each other three times a day. Fourteen days until I can go back to work.

And today my husband started coughing…