Day 1: Ma, I Tested Positive

Day 1--Four Days after my positive test--Tuesday, Nov. 24, 2020

Mom,

I am writing because I couldn’t call you Monday morning at 6:30am after I’d read the email.  I tested positive.  Tested positive based on a test I took last Friday at 10am.  It’s not a positive test for pregnancy or AIDS, but for this new virus called COVID-19.  It’s a 2019 disease that is damaging respiratory tracts through its moldy and deadly spores, which look like coronas -- latin for “crowns” -- when viewed through microscopes.  The Spanish Flu killed an estimated 675,000 people in the US from 1918-1920 and an estimated 50 million worldwide.  We are hovering around the 265,000 deaths mark in the US right now, and I don’t know the worldwide count.  I just know the United States is leading the world in cases and deaths, and that’s as far as I can go right now.  I bet that we have another year before we start to see a clearing in what is a dark forest under dark clouds with a little light breaking through.  What little light that is breaking through is due to talks of a few vaccines.  Until we get there, as of today, your daughter is one of the estimated 200,000 new daily cases in the US alone.

I had to read the test result a few times, and then go back and line up all the negatives — since June, five negatives, Ma.  I had to blink again when I saw the positive.  The first thing I thought of was just breathing and pausing to feel my body.

I was okay. 

I will be okay.

Won’t I?

Then I immediately thought of all the kids I may have put in harm’s way.  I called the next closest version of you — your sister, the always reliable Aunt Carol — at 6:35am.  She had just sent me a text responding to a comment I had made of how frightened I’d been by the numbers that are climbing as she prepared for work as a school nurse and tracer.

Now I would have to tell her that I am one of them. 

“What’s up?” she said. 

“I tested positive.”

“Oh.”

“I think I’m fine.  I had a runny nose last week and a headache, which I am sure are allergies to the leaves I was raking.  And I had a bit of a temp, maybe, but I had my period last week, and my temp changes around it.  I don’t think I’ve had any symptoms at all.  I’m just worried about the kids and anyone I saw this weekend.”

We went through all the scenarios of how close and how they were all masked, outside and distanced while the kids played basketball.  I explained that my obsession with our cleaning of the park by raking most of it was maybe what saved us a lot of anxiety if nothing else because it kept me far away from our kids, staff and parents.  Then realized it was best to let them all know immediately instead of waiting hours or even a day for the NYC tracer or my doctor to provide guidance on who was at risk, and who was not.

Ma, it was still hard for me to write those emails.  It was embarrassing.  It was more than feeling dirty.  It felt like I’d been irresponsible.  Like I shouldn’t have taken the subway or gone to the grocery store, masked and even double masked as I had been doing on a few occasions.  I had just canceled my membership to my high end, “Best in HVACs” gym last week because numbers were climbing and because no one was there anyway, which could be argued as a reason to go or not to go.  There were maybe 3-5 people on each floor and no more than three in the locker room ever, and, if there were more than 3-5 people, I moved away from them, including the one guy who was just breathing way too hard as he lunged towards me.  The pool was my greatest risk, and maybe that’s how I got it after taking a much-needed dip after working the elections for nine days in Philadelphia.  I don’t think I got it in the hotel in Philly, but there was that one night of hearing a loud cougher on my floor.  I don’t think it was there though because I don’t think it could go through the vents, could it?  It must have been the pool.  There were three swimmers in one four-lane pool.  Again, best of HVAC systems, and sanitation stands everywhere.  But maybe that was it - the lack of open air considering how safe it’s been outside, and the fact that we can’t swim with masks on.

Or maybe I got COVID by not wearing a thick enough mask all the time or those eight minutes I took my mask off to eat at Joe’s Coffee because I was the only person in the joint aside from the guy behind the counter.  Maybe he gave it to me or I gave it to him or maybe we should stop with all this blaming of who did what since my god, all I was doing was trying to get a tea and snack and he was just trying to work a job and pay his rent.  Or maybe it was my riding the subway from 79th Street up to 116th Street for all of 12-13 minutes even though I was standing by the doors, moving as far as I could from others, and not holding the handrail.  Or just sitting down six feet away like all of us were trying to do.  It wasn’t like we were irresponsible, or was it, Ma?  It is a matter of trying to live even with restrictions, and even that is hard, Ma, after almost nine months of living in a Twilight Zone where everyone is masked and we don’t trust each other because we simply cannot.  

I shouldn’t be whining to you because all I think about when I see these nurses and doctors and hospital and nursing home staff is you.  They’re showing up, Ma.  People are dying, their friends are gravely ill, they’re dying, they’re struggling to keep up, and they keep showing up.  I just have to stay healthy enough to not have to see any of them because that would not just be bad from a health standpoint, but it just would be embarrassing, a total sign of disrespect because it would fall under one of the most-often and justified material lines ever:  “I told you so.” 

You’re right.  There’s no other way to cut it.  This is my fault for being off my game, for dropping my guard for a swim and/or a sip, for not doubling up my mask when I should have known better.

You’re going to be mad when I say after I read the positive test, I didn’t believe it.  I was selfish again, Ma, after I read that positive test because it wasn’t so positive to me.  I didn’t have enough symptoms to really have it, did I?  I told your sister that I didn’t have it.  I emailed my doctor saying that I wanted a retest.  There’s just no way I had it — couldn’t I get tested again?  Both said not a good idea and “you have it,” then “but okay, if you insist.”  False positives are not common, my doctor reminded me.  It’s usually a false negative due to a botched test or bad sample.  But I kept asking my body, “Is this for real?” Were those sniffles last week, that little headache, that touch of a fever, really COVID-19?  Why didn’t it get worse?  Will it get worse?

With no way to answer, there was only one way to find out.  I took out my credit card, dropped $250 and made an appointment for 3:20pm Monday afternoon.  I charged up my scooter.  No cab.  No public transit.  Get in and out.  When I got to the rapid test site, I waited outside and saw the woman lip-synch my name through the window.  I hustled into my booth and out, holding my breath as much as I could.  I think I was in the office for one minute.  I wore two masks — a new N95 that I saved for only emergency situations, and this counted — and I wore a surgical mask over it. 

After reading the positive result for the second time in one day, I forwarded the results to Aunt Carol.

“Yes, you have it.”

AKA “TOLD YOU SO.”

Then I wrote to my doctor and apologized. 

I now get why people deny it.  It’s just an embarrassing feeling to get what everyone says not to get 24/7, and I, myself, have partaken in those lectures.  You feel dumb and irresponsible and like you were not doing your job.  I felt like I let everyone down, and worse, I felt like I’d put others in harm’s way.

I told Meg that I couldn’t come to her rental in NJ for a while, and certainly not for Thanksgiving.  She said she’d tell the kids I had to work.  I said later that they have to know the truth not “Aunt Maureen had to work.”  Heck, Aunt Carol is going to let the word out to all of Wynantskill, NY, and I really don’t care what they think or say.  Many of the kids in our program know as do their parents.  My niece and nephew could handle it.  Meg wrote back, “I’ll tell them Wednesday.  I don’t need them telling everyone at school that their aunt has COVID.” 

What I want people to know is that I am counting my lucky breaths, Ma.  The kids shouldn’t worry, yet we can’t let them think it is okay to make light of what is a deadly virus and all we don’t know about it.  What we know about it is harrowing enough.  A friend called me last night, and confessed that he had the virus in March.  He doesn’t tell people because he’s afraid of the stigma, and he doesn’t want to relive the moments where he went to sleep and was worried that he may not make it.  He asked his doctor, “Am I going to die?” And all the doctor said was, “It’s a new virus.”

I know friends who have had it, friends of friends who have died from it, including a rising actor and proud dad, Nick Cordero, who was in good health.  I cried for him, his wife and my friends when I heard the news of his passing.  Even your son-in-law’s former business partner died from complications of COVID or a kidney issue or both.  When Meg text me that Gil had died in Hungary, leaving his wife and young child behind, I cried, and I reached out to his sister who let me stay with them when I went to that girls’ orphanage in Colombia ten years ago right after you died, and that made me think of all the kids who have lost both parents to COVID. 

After Gil died from COVID complications early last week, I decided to give up the gym.  It was just days before I’d told myself that I have to be healthy and ready to help Meg and the kids.  I have to be healthy to help the kids in our program.  I have to be healthy to keep picking up trash, raking leaves and doing good things in the neighborhood.  I told myself all these things because my god, I’ve seen the horror stories of how awful it to be a parent with COVID, in a hospital, sick or with sick kids or partners.  My God, Ma.  These stories are everywhere.  And if you have a mild case, or you fear a mild case or your work is shut down because somebody has it, it’s too often leveling people financially.  People who don’t have it and can’t work because of industries being decimated — travel, retail, restaurants, sports even — they have no idea how they’re going to make it through the winter. 

There are icebergs everywhere now, Ma.  And the health care workers — your kindred souls — are going to have a brutal weekend watching so much pain and possibly carrying the disease and the pain home with them.  That’s what you did, Ma.  You lost people you loved.  You took care of the hospice patients that nobody else wanted to take care of, the ones who had no family members to stop and see them, so you stayed late, past your clock-out time because, Ma, that is who you were and my god, if there’s anyone who feels so damn lucky today, to not be sick and holding on for air, and to know that she was brought into the world by a woman who would do anything for those in need right now, it is me, Ma.  It’s me.  Because of you.

I know you are not here to make sure I am okay by doing what others are doing by sending me food, texts and emails, and offering to do a FaceTime or Zoom to help me get through.  I know if you were here, if you were healthy, if you could work, you would be finding a wing of the house to keep yourself in so you could love your kids and love your patients at the same time.  Not everyone can do what you did, Ma.  And if any of us were sick, really sick, we know who would be in the trench with us.

The least I can do right now is suck up this quarantine and thank any spiritual objects that epitomize luck that I am asymptomatic while at the same time, not for once second sending a message or hint that there’s any guarantee or rhyme or reason why I have tested positive with no symptoms.  All I can do is hope that my status does not change.  Some of the kids in our program and the families are being tested.  I was outside, masked, distanced from all of them.  Except one girl.  On Sunday I went inside Joe's and she with me for eight minutes, just enough time for me to buy her a smoothie before we sat down outside so she could teach me my first lesson in drawing on an ipad.  The tracer I spoke to today said he has to track her, but it’s still low risk.  I had already corresponded with her mom by 7 am via text and her family agreed to go into quarantine for five days and then they will test.  I told them I was so sorry.  Yet she’s my worry, Ma.  Her family, too.  She’s the one I’m checking in on, and once we clear that test in four days, I’ll stop texting her each day, and feel like I can fully breathe.

Everyday I’ll get up and I will assess how I feel.  The sniffles and headache are behind me.  I still feel a little off, and maybe I am just anxious, but I am okay.  Let's hope it stays that way.  I’ll write, and draw and listen to music and pursue work and projects that often feel like they get me nowhere.  I’ll give everything to what I do no matter what because of you, Ma.  Because that is what you did for your patients, for your co-workers, for your family, for anyone who was sick or dying in the neighborhood, and for people you barely knew. 

When I see these doctors and nurses tell their stories of watching people die and suffer, and when they have to tell them of other family members who are now dead because of the virus, I think of you, Ma.  I make myself watch without complaint because you did all of this for 31 years, and you did not complain one bit.  You just kept showing up.  You kept giving.  In all the turmoil that life brought you, and the same grief and turmoil and injustice this year has brought so many Americans, we have to look around, dig deep, show up, stay positive, find the light somewhere in those dark clouds in that dark forest, and just keep on giving.

Until tomorrow ...

Maureen