The whole idea was not to catch COVID-19. Ever. Hence, the careful adherence to safety protocols, from wiping down our groceries in the earliest days of the pandemic, to not touching mail for hours and being vigilant about handwashing and mask-wearing.
Two years into it, this is how COVID-19 found us. Four days after my 12-year-old got her first dose of the vaccine (on her birthday), we visited my sister-in-law and her family in Anaheim. It was a Labor Day weekend pool party. Four families came. Almost all the adults there were vaccinated, but the under-12 set was not. It was a Sunday.
My daughter went to school that Tuesday (Monday being Labor Day). On Thursday night, my sister-in-law called, aghast, to report that her 9-year-old daughter got a positive result through her school’s testing. This was the cousin my Cheeky Baby had spent hours with in and out of the pool.
I emailed my child’s principal to say we would be keeping her home and testing for COVID-19 “just in case.” I was hoping since they spent most of the day outdoors, we would be spared. But that night, Cheeky reported a “very bad headache,” and uncharacteristically asked to sleep in our bed. Of course, I said yes. (I live for any chance at extra cuddles.)
We found a lab in Monrovia that performed PCR tests with same-day results and spent the hours waiting setting up Cheeky’s isolation room, also known as Mom and Dad’s bedroom. Just in case. It had a TV, the big bed and its own bathroom. That is where we were when we found out we were not “thinking positive and testing negative.”
My boys, no doubt remembering Uncle Manny and two other relatives we lost to COVID-19, were initially deathly afraid for their baby sister. “Mom, is she going to be OK?”
But since said sister never spiked a fever, and regularly texted them from her sick room, they were soon happy just to answer the little bell we gave our patient. The light peal would summon any one of us to her closed door: for more Kleenex or water or snacks or just a quick chat.
My siblings and friends in the medical profession reminded me of what I’d learned throughout the pandemic about germ warfare. But I was still gently scolded for thinking I could hug my sick girl.
“Are you really asking me a fourth time if you could hug her? No, you can’t,” my physician assistant sister said. “How are you going to help her and the boys if you get sick?”
So I Amazon Primed everything Lysol: spray, laundry disinfectant and wipes. I kept the door to the sick room closed. I was the only one allowed in, and then, only when masked. I fielded concerned texts and calls and prayed the girls and mom in Cheeky’s carpool would remain healthy. They tested on Day 5 from their last exposure. Negative. One fervent prayer answered, and one daughter thanked for her careful mask-wearing.
My daughter’s whole class went online, and I muttered more apologies to the whole group. Day 5 of her isolation saw the peak of her symptoms (elevated temperature, loss of sense of taste and general malaise) and by Day 7, my daughter was ringing the patient’s bell to see which of her brothers would answer her call fastest.
We had the dubious recognition of being the first COVID-19 case on campus, and thankfully, it stopped with my daughter. I point to our school’s multi-layered safety protocols and the staff’s dedication to adhering to them, as well as our principal’s transparency and openness. She was clear about what we needed to do, safeguarded our privacy while relaying vital news to others, and remained supportive and patient throughout the ordeal.
“We just want her back with us 100 percent,” she said.
Since March 2020, we had weighed the risks of all our activities. Our daughter’s bout with COVID-19 was thankfully mild. None of us in the home who were vaccinated got sick or tested positive. My husband and I got our booster shots last week. (We got the Pfizer-Moderna combo and it laid us low for two days and was the worst shot of the three doses.)
But we remain thankful. We have to live with COVID-19 and our dance with it taught me the interconnectedness of us all. We were careful.
My sister-in-law, who is a nurse, is even more germ-phobic. Yet her child caught the virus in school and because we chose to visit them, our daughter caught it too. Her classmates and teacher could have caught it during the two days she was in school, oblivious and infectious, but the protocols worked.
We get to have life post-COVID now. I tell my daughter to write her COVID story. She says it will be about how her friends made her laugh while she was sick, and how Aunty Michelle texted her every day to ask how she was feeling.
She will joke about how my sister-in-law, in her guilt, she says, sent almost-daily Amazon packages of candy and toys, and how her brothers brought her water and cuties at the flick of her wrist and she didn’t have to do any chores, and how she felt muscle-achey and headachey but in the best way warm all over from the feel of all the people who love and worried about her.
Anissa V. Rivera, columnist, “Mom’s the Word,” Pasadena Star-News, San Gabriel Valley Tribune, Whittier Daily News, Azusa Herald, Glendora Press and West Covina Highlander, San Dimas/La Verne Highlander. Southern California News Group, 605 E. Huntington Drive, Suite 100, Monrovia, CA 91016. 626-497-4869.
