Shelly and Sherrie Howell, 53 and 73, Pleasanton

In 2009, Shelly Howell was a healthy 42yearold — until the H1N1 pandemic. The infection landed her in the hospital for four months, where she spent five weeks in a coma and nine weeks on a ventilator. She awoke as a quadraplegic, and had to relearn everything — from walking to brushing her teeth. The illness brought on years of other longterm issues, including permanent lung damage.

Howell tried to be extra cautious when the coronavirus hit, before Pleasanton went on lockdown. She got sick anyway. March 7 marked her first symptom: an odd gurgling in her stomach that her mother, Sherrie Howell, 73, could hear from across the room. Then came the shooting abdominal pain; then, the debilitating headaches and dizziness. On the third day, her mother woke up and said her head was spinning. At that point, none of their symptoms fit the profile for the socalled “three” symptoms of coronavirus: fever, shortness of breath, and cough. Tests were limited, so they tried to stay out of the hospital for as long as they could. But the pains continued to grow.

Over the past three months, Shelly experienced 45 different symptoms — and her mother experienced at least 40 of the same ones, always a few days behind her. Chills that felt like ice cubes were running through her body, extreme indigestion, a constant smelling of gasoline or burnt acid, joint pain, strawberry tongue, brain fog. The oddest one, she says, was a feeling like she was in an idling car, but magnified 100 times. “It was like my cells were rolling around in circles all over my body,” she said.

One day, she was calmly chopping onions, and suddenly she could feel her pulse, pounding in her neck: It was at 148 beats per minute, more than 90 beats above her resting rate. She and her mother both went to the ER at different times, and when she went, they found kidney stones, gallstones and inflammation in organs including her pancreas.

“It’s almost like there’s this monster inside of you,” she said. “And it’s going to play different games with you on different days.”

The most curious part was that it felt like clockwork, as if the virus was operating on its own sinister schedule. They had three phases of it, each that lasted around three weeks and then left them with three days of rest, as the virus plotted its next attack. Her flareups happened between 5 p.m. and 7 p.m.; her mother’s between 10 p.m. and 2 a.m.

One day in late May, Shelly woke up and, finally, felt better. Her mother lagged two weeks behind but is on the mend. Shelly has since experienced more pain, and more new symptoms — but she and her mother both know that with this virus, mending is a complicated and nonlinear process.

“There is no one that can tell you when it’s going to end,” she said.