Well 2021 started off with a real bang. As much as we hoped for a good year avoiding Covid-19 as much as possible, the dreaded pandemic hit our house. Yes, we caught the 'Rona...
That meant quarantine for real this time. We could not leave our house. We lived and breathed Lysol.
Russell caught the dreaded disease first. One of his co-workers had Covid and didn't know. A few days after he got off shift, his co-worker called and said she had just tested positive for Covid. Great, we thought. The next day, Russell started to have symptoms including a sore throat and cough. Sure enough he had the virus. After testing positive, we isolated him to the bedroom and the kids and I started cleaning like crazy. For 5 days, Russell was locked in the room while we brought him meals on a tray. In the meantime, our house was quarantined and the kids had to start home school again. This was sure fun especially as a now single mom.
Originally I was not going to get tested unless I had symptoms. Then one of my friends, who works for my OB doctor, called and said I should probably get tested anyway because if I am positive, they needed to monitor the baby as well as me and do certain treatments because I was pregnant. So I went and got tested. Hallelujah it was negative. But then my throat started bugging me and I had a slight cough. My doctor said to go get retested because my first results were most likely wrong... So back to the clinic I went to have them stick a Q-tip up my nose to touch my brain. Well you guessed it, these results were positive for Covid...
By this time, I was at my wits end. I was tired of the stress, the worry, the extra work, and just all of it. I started bawling on the way home from the clinic.
Little did we know, Russell had contaminated us before we even knew he had it. When we found out I had it too, we realized it was pointless to isolate because we had already contaminated the house and the kids anyway. So move on with our lives, right, and hope for the best. Russell came out of isolation that night and together we faced the 'Rona. It was such a relief to have some more help even if we were sick together.
The kids were mad though because this meant another week of quarantine and home school. Luckily, most of Russell's symptoms were done by this time so he was pretty much feeling better. I called my doctor to see what treatment I needed because of being pregnant. Normally a pregnant woman with Covid has to be on Lovenox (blood thinner) shots for two weeks. I was not looking forward to this but was going to do whatever I needed to. When I called the doctor, however, she said new research had just come out that said the shots were not necessary anymore! Yeah! I didn't need to do them. She did warn me to watch for blood clot symptoms and come in right away if anything seemed out of the normal. They remotely monitored my blood pressure and oxygen stats through out the week just in case too.
Russell seemed to have the worst symptoms. He had fevers, body aches, coughing and difficulty breathing. (Not to mention boredom from being isolated.) My symptoms seemed much more mild thankfully. Mine really just felt like a head cold. I never had the fever or body aches (well other than being pregnant...) but my nose was quite congested and that made it hard to breath. There were a few times that felt like I could not breath. Other than that I was fine. We both lost our senses of smell and taste. This was really weird. It didn't really bother us though. In fact, there are some benefits to having no smell I found out. Those symptoms took a while to come back to normal.
As for the kids, they seemed to be okay. We never took them to get tested because we figured if we have it, they probably have it too. Colby and Charlotte both had fevers for a couple days and then they were fine. Logan never had a fever but said he couldn't taste or smell anything. Emily seemed to be the only safe one with no symptoms. But now that we think about it, we think she might have had Covid a month or so ago because she had a cold and said she couldn't smell or taste anything. We are great parents and told her she was fine. She even kept going to school. (Sorry...) So we figured she was immune to the Covid virus when we got it. Who knows?
Well, after being locked in the house for half a month, we were all ready to escape and get out. The kids have never been so happy to go to school in their whole lives!
I realized that I too needed to get out so, even though it looked like a blizzard outside, I took the dog for a walk outside.
It was so nice to get out! I didn't even care that it was cold and snowy. I walked 2.5 miles that day just to be alone and it was amazing.
Since then, Russell has been able to help out with giving Covid vaccines to people.
Even though he has not had the vaccine yet, because he has had the virus, he can help out. He says the vaccine is getting out there and they give a ton of them each day. Hopefully this vaccine will get rid of this virus and we can go back to life before the pandemic. It has truly been a miracle of science that this vaccine has been developed so fast and is being administered so quickly. Russell is the only one that can get the vaccine in our family so far but he has to wait for about 90 days after he had Covid to get it.
We are all hoping this virus will get behind us now. We are also hoping that the virus I had will not affect the baby. We really don't know if it has or not but we did an extra ultrasound just in case and everything seemed to be okay from what they could tell from that. So fingers crossed she will be fine.
What did we learn from this ordeal? Well, we learned once again that we are not alone. We had a couple people randomly drop off dinner unexpectedly, calls and texts from friends to see how we were, and the kids teachers were great helps too. We also received answers to our prayers. Even though it was scary at first because we didn't know how the virus would affect us, the Lord answered our prayers in giving us the strength to get through it. We also received the blessing of having mild symptoms that so far have not shown any lasting effects. This was a great answer to our prayers. Sometimes you have to go through hard times to realize your blessings.
Goodbye Covid, please don't come back.
