It’s Been 5 Days Since They Tested My Family for Coronavirus
What testing is like, plus an update with my results
Friday it got hard to breathe.
My 5-year-old daughter and I hadn’t left the house in three days. We called in sick to school — Last week, school was still a thing children went to.— even though I figured we probably just had colds. Tuesday I started to feel feverish. I checked her temperature — 100.4 — and gave us both acetaminophen without even bothering to check my own temp. That’s parenting for ya.
We decided to self-quarantine, but I wondered if we were overreacting. Sure, we’d just been in Seattle, staying with a friend who had “fever and the worst respiratory sickness I can remember,” but he did a great job of staying in his bedroom. I barely even saw him.
But Friday I started wheezing. I couldn’t speak a complete sentence without gasping for breath. The feeling brought me back to my teen years: asthma and chronic bronchitis, steroids and allergy tests and emergency inhalers.
I remembered the chest X-ray, when they checked me for lung cancer and emphysema, how I collapsed on the floor of the hospital because my teenage self thought a “negative” result meant I really had cancer. (Shouldn’t positive be the good one?)
