Editor’s Note: It seems like every time I turn around, someone else I know is testing positive for COVID. My own household went through it prior to this current Omicron surge – the day after I threw my husband a surprise party for his 40th birthday, he tested positive, which was a truly unhappy way to ring in a new decade. Though we live in a rather small townhouse and share a single shower, I somehow never got sick. Such is the power of vaccines. I am a convert.
If you disagree, please take your disagreement elsewhere.
Anyway, back to our friend the virus…Everyone these days has a COVID story to tell. What appears below is one of them – a testament to just how difficult life with small children, combined with illness and quarantine, can be. Contributor Leanne Ricchiuti’s pandemic holiday tale makes me sad, even though it does have a happy end. (Spoiler alert: They all recover). People are struggling all over, each of us facing down our respective demons on the daily.
I hope reading this encourages you to hug your loved ones a little tighter – assuming they’re COVID negative, of course – and to stay home when you don’t feel well, and to wear your mask (the right way, nose AND mouth covered, please!), and, above all, get vaccinated. – LB
I don’t know about everyone else, but when my husband and I contracted COVID, our first concerns were for our toddler son, our jobs, and finances. It was not, however, to report our positive status to literally everyone we might have breathed on in the two weeks prior, much to the dismay of some of said people.
Our son had a bad case of RSV and pneumonia this past October, so I was especially worried about him. Respiratory syncytial virus, or RSV, is a common virus that usually causes mild, cold-like symptoms. Most people recover in a week or two. But RSV can be serious, especially for infants and older adults. In our son’s case, it was undiagnosed for about 3 weeks, by which time it had morphed into bacterial pneumonia.
My husband has asthma and I have chronic persistent sinusitis. So initially, our COVID symptoms were hard to pinpoint as COVID. The joke about not knowing the difference between COVID and a cold or allergies is very real for us. My husband came down with it first. He woke up feeling groggy, but still went to work. He came home around lunchtime, and by dinner, he had a fever. He got tested, and 24 hours later, we knew.
I lasted 48 hours until my symptoms started, but they were vastly different than my husband’s. I got tested, with our son, and I came back positive, but he was negative.
We did all the things. We told our employers and our daycare provider. And then we took a look at the bank account.
My husband had just recently started at a new job and didn’t really have any sick time. Long story, and some stress later, we learned that he was eligible for COVID pay. What a relief. However, I work at a firm part-time, and freelance my PR services. If I don’t work, I don’t get paid. Which means I worked while sick, while caring for my sick husband (who was sicker than I was), and also parenting my not-at-all-sick son, who only wanted to go outside and fight with his dinos.
Imagine every meme you’ve ever seen, or every mom blog you’ve ever read, about how overworked moms are, multiply it by 1,000 and then you’ll know what it’s like to be a sick mother taking care of a sick family while also working.
I’m not going to sit here and preach to you about appreciating mothers, or women who work from home for themselves, but I’ll be damned if I don’t recognize those heroes and put them on a pedestal to be worshiped like the queens they are.
It. Is. Hard.
My husband and I are both vaccinated, but we still felt pretty lousy. It’s unclear if we had the omicron variant, and we likely never will know. It wasn’t until five days after we tested positive that we started to tell anyone outside of work what was going on.
We had to tell my extended family, who we were scheduled to see the following weekend for an early Christmas celebration and with whom we had just spent Thanksgiving. You can imagine the worry, since we were still within the incubation period – or at least according to the most recent CDC guidance, which seems to change by the day.
After the notifications, emails, and calls to HR and daycare, all we could do was wait. And eat soup.
I had already completed about 90 percent of my holiday gift shopping by Thanksgiving this year. I’m not exactly sure how I did that with everything else I had going on, but thankfully I did. And by day five of our quarantine, all the presents were wrapped and under the tree, taunting my husband and son.
With the presents handed, I turned to the next challenge: Keeping us fed.
I actually don’t like Instacart. This isn’t a dig at the company or the idea of having someone else do your grocery shopping, but rather, a realization about myself. I’m very, very picky. Precise. Exact. Purposeful. I don’t just buy another brand of something because it’s “the same.” I might buy a generic, but once I make that commitment, I can’t go back. I hate change.
When the shopper started chatting with me and substituting things, I freaked out! I had already said I didn’t want to substitute my Arnold Whole Wheat bread for Hannaford’s brand, when I see a message while I’m making dinner for everyone that she has already checked out! So, then I’m trying to text her frantically to NOT do any of the things that were seemingly completed, and I burned the chicken rice. High stakes this Instacart thing is.
But since I couldn’t leave the house, I had to use it about four times during our extended quarantine. Despite my very best instructions to preserve the bananas, they would always come with brown spots, or, worse yet, in the bag with the frozen food. WHO DOES THAT?
Instacart angst aside, there were a lot of downsides to our quarantine. We missed all the fun holiday activities: Pictures with Santa, outdoor extravaganzas, family gatherings. One positive was that our son is too young to know what he was missing. As long as we stayed upbeat, he was fine.
Just as we thought we were poised to escape our drywall prison, the county department of health called. This was the first contact we had with anyone from the DoH in 10 days. I had already gotten a follow-up test for my son to return to daycare and was awaiting the results. He had been completely fine the whole time, and my husband and I were on the mend. But apparently, despite his initial negative test, and regardless of what his impending test results would be, our child’s 10-day quarantine was to begin after mine ended.
What. the actual. Duck.
Back to Pinterest I went to find activities and crafts to help enrich my chi…….to keep my son occupied long enough for me to use the bathroom in peace, and maybe make a phone call. Remember, I was still working.
And I needed Instacart again.
We finally got out of quarantine on Dec. 23. We still couldn’t celebrate as usual because we learned a couple of days prior that my sister-in-law has just gotten COVID. We gathered small. And we putt off seeing my parents until the new year. But you can bet one of the first things I did was get my Italian pastries in time for Christmas.
I tried to make this story a little more light-hearted than the actual experience of all the stress, angst, and worry that filled my December. While COVID is nothing to make light of, it is important to remember that it can always be worse. My son could have been sick. My husband could not have gotten COVID pay. We could have infected a family member. And of course, the fate of many others who have contracted this virus and fallen very ill, even died, was one that we thankfully managed to avoid.
This is not the forum to pontificate about vaccines and masks, but I’m thankful we were vaccinated, and were taking precautions. I’m thankful that our Christmas was only restructured, and not completely ruined. I’m thankful that Instacart has an instant chat feature, and that my terrible Rensselaer County internet service worked long enough for me to correct some atrocious mistakes.
