By Erin, guest blogger

On Monday, I saw you at the pool

You pulled a chair up at my table. It wasn’t the first time you had done this, but it still felt odd to have someone outside my immediate family within 6 feet of me.

I was getting my kids out of the house so that my house cleaners could come. I thought I needed to do this to protect myself and my kids from any germs the cleaners or their equipment might be carrying.

We laughed when the skies darkened and it started to storm – the cleaners would not be finished yet. You invited me over to your house, an offer which surprised me, not only because you assumed my kids and I were germ-free, but also that you were asserting the same about you and your kids.

I didn’t take you up on the offer. Instead, I drove my kids to see my husband at work, where we ate takeout for lunch in his office. We wore masks in the hallways and bathrooms. We yelled at our kids not to touch things and we used hand sanitizer. We thought we needed to do these things to protect them from other people’s germs.

After leaving my husband’s office, I still wanted to wait to go home. I had read somewhere that the coronavirus can survive in aerosols for 3 hours.

To make it to the 3-hour mark post-cleaners, I took my kids to the Science Center. It was our first time doing anything like this for five months. I reminded them every three minutes to pull their masks up over their noses. I reminded them not to touch the glass in the aquarium. We used hand sanitizer at every dispenser we passed. We saw the anteater and the new tigers. We had a good time.

We had done everything right

As you can probably tell, up to this point we have tried to be careful about our exposure.

My husband and I both worked exclusively from home from March to mid-July. We took our kids out of daycare and summer camps. We got all our groceries and other necessities delivered. We saw friends from time to time, but always stayed outside. We held my husband’s 40th birthday party in a church parking lot, rotating groups of less than 10 friends through in one-hour increments. We took a week-long vacation at a beach house in June, to which we brought all our own food. We still self-quarantined for 14 days when we got back.

We did these things because we could. Because we knew not everyone else was able to.

When we decided to go back to our pool, it was the first time the kids had ridden in a car for months. They had almost forgotten how to buckle their seat belts. They cheered, “We’re zooming!”

The pool is probably the riskiest place we regularly go. We wipe down our chairs when we get there. We try to keep our distance from others.

On Tuesday, we went back to the pool

I sat on the side while my husband splashed with the kids. We didn’t see anyone we knew. It was a pleasant evening.

On Wednesday, my husband swabbed his own nose

For COVID.

He was required to go back to his office two days a week at the end of July, and his work required a test of all employees. My husband had waited until the last possible day to take his test. It wasn’t as bad as he had expected.

On Friday, the phone rang

We were back at the pool. We had just finished wiping down our chairs. I had chatted with a friend for a few minutes. The kids had just jumped in the pool. When my husband noticed he’d missed a phone call.

It was from PWN Health. His COVID test.

My heart thudded. PWN Health did not leave a voicemail.

My husband checked his email. His test results were in. He had to log into a website to view them. The website would not come up on his phone. He tried mine. It didn’t work either.

After several minutes of refreshing, the website finally came up. He found a way to view the results. There was a red exclamation point at the top of the page: Detected. I had to read it twice to make sense of it. His test was positive.

I calmly told the kids to get out of the pool. It’s time to go home now.

They asked why. I told them I would explain when we got in the car.

When we told them Daddy found out he has the coronavirus, our son said, “Poor Daddy.”

My husband said that he felt totally fine. He had no symptoms. I had to move his travel coffee mug to make room in the cup holders for the half-drunk cans we had taken to the pool. The mug spilled rancid three-day-old coffee on the floor mat. I used napkins from the glove box to soak it up, my head swirling like the sour milk.

We put on our masks

When we got home, we put on our masks. A couple months ago, I had made them out of old t-shirts and flannel pajamas. My husband has two. The kids and I each only have one. We hardly ever leave the house, so one each had seemed sufficient. I will make more masks.

I started to feel a lot worse. My throat hurt. My legs ached. All of the seemingly random pains, dizziness, and sniffles I’d been having over the past couple months suddenly had a possible explanation. My temperature was 99.4. The kids’ temperatures were normal. I called the friends we had hung out with the previous weekend. I apologized to them.

We got the kids ready for bed. We read books on the side porch with our masks on. I tucked them into my son’s bunk beds.

I would sleep in my daughter’s bed and my husband in ours.

I called my parents in Florida. They demanded to know where we had gotten it, whether I had contacted everyone I’d seen for the past two weeks. I told them they were not being supportive enough. They calmed down. I called my brother, who is a doctor. He suggested that it could have been a false positive. He told me to get myself and the kids tested. He yawned a lot.

On Saturday, I took the kids to Urgent Care

We had to stand out in the hot parking lot for 20 minutes before we could get checked in. Even though I had made us an appointment.

We wore our masks.

As I reminded the kids to keep back from the people in front of us, my gut told me that our tests would be negative, that I didn’t have COVID-19, that we were wasting everyone’s time.

The kids colored in the waiting room with old crayons I had fished from the bottom of my purse. We used hand sanitizer. Our temperatures were normal. Our blood oxygen levels high.

My son was wary of the test. I told the nurse I had been expecting a brain tickle, but she only swabbed gently inside each of our lower nostrils. She said there are different types of tests, and this wasn’t the brain tickle type. She didn’t laugh at any of my attempts at jokes.

When we got home, I started telling more people. I called the pool. The manager seemed shaken. We were the first case at the pool to have notified him.

I texted the mother in charge of the “pod” I had been busy setting up for our kids for remote school this year. She said, “We’ll get through this together.” I found that comforting.

I texted more family members. One said, “It’s just not realistic that we will all just stay in our houses for a year.” Which I read to say, she thought we must have gotten it because we did something we weren’t supposed to do. I probably would assume the same thing if someone else I knew tested positive. But we have been as careful as everyone else I know, if not more so. How could we have possibly picked this up?

I thought about all the things we didn’t do this summer because we were trying to avoid COVID, and we still got it anyway. We cancelled a vacation with my husband’s brother’s family. We cancelled a trip to Disney for my daughter’s fifth birthday. We didn’t go to our nephew’s high school graduation. We didn’t go out to celebrate our tenth wedding anniversary. We isolated ourselves to a point I had previously thought was impossible. We still got COVID anyway.

On Sunday, I weeded the yard

I heard laughter in the neighbor’s backyard and wondered when we’d laugh again in ours. I realized that all the things I had been doing to isolate myself and my family were out of fear of being exposed to others. When, instead, I should have been protecting others from us.

I felt ashamed.

I texted our house cleaners. Now we were the ones whose house could have potentially infected others. They texted back that it was no problem, that they wear masks and gloves and were still willing to come for our next cleaning in a week.

That afternoon, we watched “Inside Out.” Joy, Sadness, and Bing Bong were traipsing through Imagination Land when my phone started buzzing.

Our test results were in. All three said: NOT DETECTED. All three said: NEGATIVE.

I took off my mask. I snuggled my daughter. I cried while the movie characters prepared Riley’s brain for adolescence.

My husband kept his mask on. He went up to our bedroom when the movie was over. I listened to Annie Lennox and Carole King while I cooked dinner. I had a beer. I put the kids to bed without my mask on.

On Monday, my husband made phone calls

He asked his work for another test. They wouldn’t give him one.

He tried to book one at CVS, but their appointments for the day were full.

He talked to the doctor who had referred our kids and me to the Urgent Care. She said that unless he had symptoms, a known exposure, or he worked in healthcare, she couldn’t register him for another test. She also said the false negative rate is much higher than the false positive rate. So even if he got retested and it was negative, we still couldn’t be sure that he didn’t have COVID.

She said he should isolate himself from the rest of us for 10-14 days from the date of the test (or from the date he got the positive test results – no one seemed to know for sure). That was a long time for me to be solely responsible for our kids.

Finally, my husband drove to the hospital to try the drive-thru testing center.

He texted me a picture of the man who helped him. The man was wearing a face shield that my husband had helped to make back in April. He said to my husband, “Sure, we’ll retest you.”

On Tuesday, my husband got the results

His second test said: NEGATIVE. It should have been a relief. But what the doctor had said about false negatives left us feeling uncertain. After his two COVID tests, and our three, we were more unsure of our family’s true COVID status than ever.

So, for the next week, my husband worked on our porch and in our bedroom. He wore his mask when he was anywhere else in the house. And my kids and I lived with a person who had tested positive for COVID.

Just a week prior, I had avoided being home within three hours of our house cleaners for fear of breathing their aerosols. Just a week prior, I had made my kids use hand sanitizer if they touched anything outside our home. Just a week prior, we had avoided going indoors with anyone outside our family. Because anyone out there could have COVID. Just a week prior, it was anyone except for us.

Then the Health Department called me

They told me to quarantine myself and my kids for 14 days from the day they entered my husband’s positive test into their system. That was four days after he got his results.

We had to quarantine for a week longer than the person who actually tested positive.

I still haven’t called or texted you. I am not sure what to tell you, other than everything I have written above.

What about you? Have you gotten the COVID test? How did you deal with sharing the news? Comment below or share your thoughts on Facebook at MothersRest.

About the guest blogger:

Erin is an attorney, wife and mother of two young kids. In her life before law school and children, she was a professional ballerina and a public radio promotions producer. Through it all, her closeted love of creative writing has been lying in wait. She just might be ready to let it out.

You can read Erin’s other post here: Motherhood keeps closing doors for me.

 

Photo credit: Image by Jerzy Górecki from Pixabay