HARRISBURG (TNS) — Watching the news coverage of President Trump as he fights coronavirus, I can’t help but recall the awful month when COVID-19 struck at my family’s house — the Wright house, not to be confused with the White House — last spring.
We were lucky; we did not have to be hospitalized, and all three of us recovered with (almost) no lingering effects. But for the whole of April, we could not tell which way this disease was taking us. The only thing I knew for sure was that it was trying to kill me; whether it would succeed was anyone’s guess.
Although I am not a fan of Trump, I do not wish him ill. I only want him and his doctors to tell the truth. Coronavirus is dangerous — surely over 210,000 deaths have taught us that — and it must not be minimized, especially by our president.
When the three Wrights came down with COVID-19 last spring, we each suffered in a different way. My son, who fell ill first, was exhausted, congested and fluish, with a hoarse but unproductive cough.
My husband got a terrible headache and sore throat, and he lost his sense of smell; he, too, felt exhaustion he’d never experienced before.
As their caregiver — it is darn hard to quarantine when you are the last family member standing — I seemed to get hit the hardest. Just as my son recovered, I came down with a bout of unfathomably icy chills. A few days later, I felt intense chest pain, profound fatigue, and shortness of breath. Particularly at night, my oxygen levels dipped, sometimes dropping below 90%, but I could still breath and talk.
Was it time to go to the hospital? If I wasn’t clearly dying, I guessed not. I might get up in the morning with enough energy to make chicken soup, only to be felled by chest tightness and low oxygen levels for the entire afternoon.
I would fall asleep at 8 p.m. feeling hopeful and then wake up at 3 a.m. freezing cold, gasping for air, my blood oxygen level at 88%. I struggled to explain to people outside our family how confusing it was. Only my cousin, an airline attendant, who’d recovered just as I got sick, understood. It’s sneaky, she said.
Anyone who has had a moderately severe case of COVID, as Trump apparently does, should know that it is so dangerous precisely because it is so unpredictable. Do you get a low fever, cold symptoms, or mild body aches? Or pneumonias, blood clots, or a cytokine storm? While co-morbidities make a severe case more likely, there is no way to know how any one person will fare.
Even if you do have “god-tier genetics,” as one MAGA Fan said recently of President Trump, COVID-19 may find a way to take you down. One person’s mild course is another person’s death sentence. Of course, it does help if you have access to the most cutting edge treatments in the country, paid for by actual taxpayers. But even the best care in the world can’t insure you’ll survive.
It’s been just four and a half days since his diagnosis, and already the president is crowing about his supposed progress against the virus. Just now, he tweeted, “Don’t be afraid of COVID. Don’t let it dominate your life.” I
I’m reminded of the night I texted my siblings to ask them to help care for our son if I died. The fact that I lived does not mean I take the virus lightly. Only fools don’t believe in luck.
(Kerry Sherin Wright is professor of English and director of the Writers House at Franklin & Marshall College.)
