4/16
From an email I wrote to my block’s listserv
Dear Neighbors:
You can just bowl me down with a feather. My COVID-19 test came back today as negative and Kara and I were both amazed. Perhaps I imagined the 18 days of fever, chest tightness and stomach distress. There’s also the 30% false negative rate that the standard test exhibits. Which is a stunningly huge failure rate when you think of it. It would be interesting to learn if we three Weisses have antibodies. Spencer didn’t have any other symptoms than a couple of stomach upsets.
There are so many mysteries still for science to solve as we wind our way through the maze of questions. I do know that once I feel just a little bit better, that I’m going to make an appointment at the Red Cross and donate blood. I’m not a brave frontline Health Care Provider like my wife and some of you but I want to do something.
In the meantime, “bee happy” for me, Kara and for each other. We will come through the worst of this.
Rick @ 2551
As of this date 5/11, there is not an antibody test available for me.
I can neither donate plasma or work as a volunteer in a food packing station. Stay tuned.
From an email exchange with a young mom friend who’s moved. She wanted to know how scared she should be:
4/17
Dear ___,
I met a young mom, belly swollen, easily 8.x months and counting on the street yesterday. She and hubby smiled at me as they passed and wished me well and I called out “Good luck mom.” My heart goes out to the soon to be and recently new moms. With all you have to worry about with pregnancy and caring for babies during normal times, how unfair that you have to worry about this too. I try to put ourselves back 20-26 years and this would have freaked Kara out. No doubt.
For frontline ICU and ER staff, it’s like the HBO series Chernobyl. When they’re intubating a sick person radiating blasting out COVID bugs it like they’re staring down a hot runaway nuclear reaction. For me it was like a mild to medium flu, stretched out extra long. I never had a fever above 101. I had headaches and weakness, low level stomach distress. My chest was tight, but I never had trouble breathing. I’ve had far worse flus but for shorter periods.
For you, your husband and the girls, chances are good, even with precautions that you’ll be exposed. But you’re not going to ever have that kind of “radioactive hot” exposure that frontline HCPs do. And since you don’t even share a bed with a healthcare worker, you probably won’t even have it as bad as I did. There seems to be a connection between how “hot” the contact is and how bad the disease you contract. And with luck and prayers you may be amongst the majority of people who it passes by altogether. I know for near certain I was not one of those people and the negative result I got was a false negative.
Continue to do your worshiping at home. My mom is watching four masses a day. Make the girls cute masks and make a game of wearing them. Carry hand sanitizer around. This is a special magic private bonding time for your little family anyway. Stay clear of large gatherings. (Which you’re no doubt doing anyway). The days have been glorious here. Maybe I’m just extra emotional, but I’m constantly spun around by how bright the colors are, how vivid the trees and the flowers are against the blue, blue skies. Don’t let your anxieties, (parental or otherwise) take that wonder away from you.
Thanks for your thoughts and prayers. Your girls are angels and we enjoy every image of them that you share.
R
4/19
Dear ___:
Thanks again for your concern. You know by the end of the 1st week, I was scared because it’s the second week when you begin to learn that you’re going to be suffering the mild version or end up in the hospital. Until you actually start to live through those days, you don’t know. It could go either way. And today when I got up, one of my classmate’s 98 year old mom passed in a nursing home. Tragic but predictable. Same day, one of Bennett’s classmate’s dad had just passed. He was a bike-riding healthnut type. Better shape than me.
The randomness is terrifying. I thought about what I’d written to you after I sent it. Was it too dire? I didn’t want to scare you. But I did want to encourage the sense of caution I could read between the lines you wrote me.
I feel stronger every day. I went out yesterday and my body felt energy flowing through it for the first time. It was joyous. Exhilarating. Kara wants to take a walk down to the Azalea Garden. Your little family is much on my mind. Stay safe and hug those girls for me. I pray someday to have grandsons or granddaughters half as gorgeous as those two.
R
Two letters to fellow freelance media pros:
4/17
Dear ___,
I am so fortunate to be married to an essential HCP who is getting her regular check as though “nothing has happened.” My heart breaks for fellow freelance creatives and tech people especially those who like me service the meeting industry. Zero meetings. Zero work. It’s a cold calculation.
Besides not being able to do the jobs we love, people are watching their bank accounts dwindle. Filing for unemployment like I just did. I get the desperation. What I don’t get is the anger directed at public officials.
Even Republican governors are getting blasted by “the base.” And the more reliant the govs are on their public health scientists, the more they’re getting shit. Where’s the stoicism and courage of my grandparents generation who were desperate, hungry and angry, but did what needed to be done? And where, in God’s name is Franklin Delano Roosevelt when you need him?
Hi ___:
As you know from my Facebook, my wife, an RN, works with cancer patients. She was flagged at her hospital entrance on 3/30, sent home and a week later tested positive. Sharing the same bed we’ve shared for 42 years, she was probably asymptomatic when she passed it on to me. After she tested positive, I quarantined myself to the living room couch where I had as much bigscreen TV as I could handle, but not a very comfortable sleep.
Plus, I was coming down with symptoms and said WTF, if I’m gonna suffer this thing, at least it’s going to be on a firm mattress. And I suffered. Constant nausea, chest tightness, constipation and fever spikes at night. I’d crawl into bed, teeth chattering feeling like my joints had been worked over with a lead pipe. Just to be clear, both K and I had very mild symptoms as it goes. Still it was incredibly scary at particularly the one week mark. Would we continue to suffer our “mild symptoms” or experience the cytokine (auto-immune) storm that sends people to ER’s, ventilators and morgues? You just don’t know which way the fickle finger of fate will point until you’re living in it. Ten days ago I was tested and found negative.
As a science and tech business writer I’m a firm subscriber to Occam’s Razor (the simplest explanation is the true one). She had it. I had it. My test was one of the 30% of nasal swabs that come back false negatives. If one in three of the tests administered comes back false negative how can we make any real assessment of who had it, who didn’t? Is this community safe to open or not. We’re like blindfolded kids whacking at a pinata.
I am feeling normal the last 5 days. Normal as in I have energy, appetite and no fever. It’s incredible how awesome “normal” feels.
Bless you for sheltering your 92 year old elder. Here in PA, according to the Philly Inquirer, 70% of our deaths have happened in assisted living and nursing homes. Kara and I had both discussed a few years ago with our 80+ moms the “benefit of assisted living.” Both old gals said no thank you. They are so smart. We get to worry about mundane things like what are they having for supper? Did they take their pills? Not whether they’ll live or die in the next couple weeks.
I worry for any elder who is in a nursing home. Likely through no fault of their own, they are death traps. I have friends who’ve rescued their moms from nursing homes just in time. Others who hesitated and lost a beloved parent. I can’t imagine the grief.
A big YO from PHILLY! Stay home. Stay chill. Listen to the scientists and health care providers. Even with faulty and insufficient testing they are working overtime to try to get a saddle on this bull. They only selfishness in their motive is the lack of desire to bend over a “hot coronavirus victim” radiating viruses as they intubate them. My nurse has a pre-existing asthma/respiratory condition. I can’t tell you how scared I was for her.
Peace and 💖💖
Rick
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