For posterity sake, here we go.
*cracks knuckles*
I'm seeing that I literally did NOT publish a single blog in the year 2021.
I think there are a couple reasons for that.
1. I'm busier than I've ever been in my life.
Having three tornadoes that need to be taken here and there and everywhere, plus running a business, plus the dozen other hats I wear..... blogging has really disappeared.
2. The pandemic burn out is REAL.
SO FLIPPING REAL, man.
I have weird anger surrounding the pandemic that I haven't felt like releasing.
I released some of it in 2020, but that's when it was fresh and new and it made sense to write about it then.
Nowadays, and in 2021, it is and was OLD news. It has been beaten with a stick 20,000x.
It never felt appropriate to write about the same old, same old. Again. And again.
But here we are!
2 years in to the pandemic and my husband finally caught the dreaded coronavirus this week.
There's a first time for everything, and boy was this first time everything I knew and didn't know it would be.
He tested positive on Monday and it didn't seem real.
I mean, really, we've dodged this for a couple years now, is this really happening?
It was happening!
Jeff was sick. Like pretty dang sick. He felt physically terrible.
He had shortness of breath and couldn't walk around without difficulty.
My brain was in full fledged panic mode.
We started reading everything we needed to do. Contacted all the people we needed to tell.
Monday night, Jeff was locked away in our bedroom and we wouldn't see him again for several days.
I immediately started calling all the people.
I called my kids pediatrician and asked if I needed to get them tested there or where?
The pediatrician's office said: "well, technically if they have no symptoms you won't know for sure if they have it till later in the week."
Later in the week!?! What is this sorcery!?
I had a lingering cold from the week before, so we concluded that we would go and just get me tested to make sure. If I was positive, then we would think about getting the kids tested even though the doctor's office said it wouldn't matter.
I was negative.
I called Grace's school Tuesday morning and the "covid tracker" lady said to me:
"Well, if she has no symptoms she really is okay to come to school today."
I nearly swore at her.
Today? Like it's 9:00 AM, my husband is freshly diagnosed with Covid-19 and I can bring her to school RIGHT NOW?
My husband... her dad.....
I couldn't even speak.
What is happening?
So I kept Grace home on Tuesday, even though she was perfectly well and the Covid Tracker was perky as all get out.
On Wednesday, I sent both seemingly healthy kids to school in masks with much trepidation.
Honestly, I needed them at school on Wednesday.
I was reeling. I was not doing well mentally. Like deep, dark pit. Deeeeeep dark pit.
Which we can get to in a minute.
All the while, that I was trying to figure us out, Jeff was completely passed out in our room for 3 solid days. It was kind of freaky not knowing how to care for him.
I would open the door to our bedroom in a mask and ask how I could help him. The answer was usually "nothing" or I could pass him some food or drink, but mostly he was just trying to rest.
Jeff and I are fully vaccinated, and we were going to get our booster shots this week. We had appointments to do so, we were ready to go.
That totally got thrown out the window, unfortunately.
I can only think, that he probably got as sick as he did, because of our tardiness on getting our booster.
We aren't really sure where he got Covid from. We both work from home and don't go out very much at all. There were a few places we had been over the holidays that could have been it. And Jeff went to lunch with his coworkers the Friday before he tested positive that could have been it too.
We'll never know.
What is a miracle, though, is that none of the rest of us got it.
With how contagious this new variant is, it's impossible to me that the rest of us have dodged it.
It really shows Jeff's strength and caring that he isolated for so long to keep the rest of us healthy.
It's hard though, because we technically aren't out of the woods with it yet. There is still a chance that we could get it from him still.
The newest thing from the CDC is that people with Covid should isolate for five days and then they are good to come around others in a mask. So technically Jeff can do that, but we are still having a difficult time accepting that. He is still staying away.
After the kids went to school on Wednesday, I felt weird and kept them home the rest of the week. It's such a political thing, which I hate.
We all tested negative on Thursday. We had no symptoms. Not even a runny nose, which is unheard of for January in Utah. ....but I still felt like we had the black plague mark on us.
I didn't want to have to explain to people that we were seemingly fine. I just felt like we were marked as dangerous and that wasn't going to change.
Thursday was a terrible day.
Kids home all day and restless. I know they were confused and nervous with Jeff being sick and locked away.
Jeff's throat was nearly closed up from being swollen and sore. He knew he had to go to the instacare.
He went to the instacare Thursday morning and waited in his car for two hours to be seen. He was gone for so long and I felt really helpless.
Also, we had appointments to get my booster (as I mentioned) and Grace and Hunter's 2nd vaccination that night. We had these appointments scheduled for a whole month before any of this happened.
I had called the pharmacy on Tuesday to see if it was even a possibility to get the shots still or if that was totally out of the question with our exposure. I obviously wasn't going to bat an eye if it wasn't an option, cause uhhhh.... this exposure was very direct.
The pharmacy, surprisingly, told me that we could still come get our shots, no problem. As long as we didn't have symptoms, we were good to go. I even asked if we needed negative tests and they said "nope!"
Well, my anxiety was through the roof, so I took the kids to get negative tests before our shots anyways.
I just thought, if we ARE positive, I need to know, because obviously we can't get the shots if we are.
So two hours in the car with the kids to get Covid tested.
All negative.
Let's go get our shots over with.
We waited at the pharmacy for an hour, because that's how those things go, and then finally the tech looked at our paperwork.
"Uhhh... this says you were exposed to Covid in the last 14 days?
"Yeah, my husband has Covid. Their dad has Covid."
The lady looked at me like I had 17 heads.
To which I pretty angrily (and if you know me, it's probably hard for you to imagine me getting angry at a stranger, ha ha) told her that the pharmacist told me directly on the phone two days ago that we were good to do this.
The pharmacist was called over and both she and the tech were swimming in a pool of uncomfortableness. They tried to explain why this wasn't a good idea. To which I said:
"This is why I called and asked you this two days ago."
I mean, it makes perfect sense.
If you're so directly exposed and continue to have that direct threat, it would be silly to get the shots done.
But still.
I had about had it.
My mental capacity to handle any of this was far past its expiration.
I told my friend early in the week that my emotional resilience was truly at a zero surrounding this whole situation.
So the question you might be asking is....
Why are you a basket case?
Why is all of this a big deal?
I mean, Jeff's okay.
He was sick, sure, but was he in the hospital?
No.
Was he needing assistance to breathe or really with much of anything?
No.
This week, truly, was hard for me, because of a traumatic event that happened to Jeff and I ten years ago.
In January of 2012, Jeff and I were freshly married. We had only been married for nine months at that point. We had just celebrated our first married Christmas together.
I was sitting in a late afternoon Child Development class at Weber State when I got a text from Jeff that said:
"I'm going to the hospital, but my parents are meeting me to see what's up, so don't worry about leaving your class."
My stupid 21 year old self was like.... ooooooookay?....
And I continued listening to my class.
20 minutes go by and I'm like, what the heck is wrong with me?
And I left to go meet Jeff at the ER.
Jeff had been having chest pain.
He was young. 23 to be exact.
He actively played indoor soccer every week. He went and played basketball with friends at least once a week too. He was what most would consider to be a normal 23 year old dude.
To be feeling chest pain, was weird.
A few weeks prior to this ER visit, he had gone to a normal family doctor who told him he had allergies.
Whatever he was allergic to was giving him chest pain.
We never really questioned that, because we were young and dumb and doctors are smart, right?
Well on that fateful January afternoon, the chest pain was concerning enough to Jeff that he went to the ER.
And told me not to worry about meeting him, since I think he really wasn't expecting it to be a big deal.
It was "allergies" after all!
I remember walking in to the ER that day...
Jeff was trying to smile. He was trying to reassure me.
The ER doctor was baffled by what was happening and told me Jeff should be dead.
"How long has he been feeling this pain?"
"A few months, I don't know, awhile. They said it was allergies."
"He should have been dead months ago then."
Jeff had a pulmonary embolism that was taking up most of his left lung. A LARGE pulmonary embolism.
If you don't know what a pulmonary embolism is, it is a blood clot that has moved to the lungs.
Blood clots usually start in random places like the legs, and if not treated will move to the lungs and kill the person.
Jeff had been living with this blood clot in his lung for what we concluded to be more than a year.
The doctors agreed with how big it was, that it had been with him for a long time. Way too long to have not killed him, honestly.
The only thing we could trace it back to was the international flight he took home from the Philippines before we got married. He went back and visited his mission the year before we got married. And on the way home he slept for 13+ hours in first class.
With how active and young Jeff was, there was literally no other event we could trace his blood clot back to.
The next four days Jeff was hospitalized and on blood thinner to get himself back to some kind of normal.
A pulmonary embolism is very abnormal for someone as young as Jeff was. Even for someone at Jeff's current age now. The average age for someone with a pulmonary embolism is 70-80 years old.
At that time, ten years ago, I went in to a weird emotionless, blank space.
Jeff didn't seem ill. Those four days in the hospital, he was as chipper as ever and totally with it. He was seemingly healthy.
The doctors and nurses actually laughed about it, because he acted the most healthy of any of the patients in the ICU, but he was actually their most critical one there.
It didn't feel like I had almost, or should have, lost my husband.
I have thought about that a lot as Jeff has been sick with Covid.
The trauma of him escaping death 10 years ago hit me HARD this week.
He wasn't anywhere near as critical this week as he was a decade ago.
But really...
....the past two years have not prepared us for this moment of actually having Covid....
Our entire lives during this pandemic have been strewn with constantly changing information, threats, how we should or should not be living our lives.
It's a lot.
It's hard to step aside and be like:
Oh sweet, we finally got the sickness, life resume as normal!
Jeff and I are no strangers to life threatening experiences.
And because of that, Jeff hasn't cared about himself with any of the silliness this week. The only thing he keeps saying is: "I hope YOU don't get it."
*heart shattered*
I have learned over the years of chronic illness and close calls that everything we do is so fluid and changing.
My relationship with God through has been ever changing as well.
I have felt a lot of anger in the past about physical challenges, and now I can see that God had a lesson behind every mountain.
Among every hard day and pit of darkness, there was something to be learned.
And nothing will prepare us for that.
No matter how long a pandemic persists, we won't ever be ready for what God wants us to know.
I am thankful for our health. Our horrible, weird, terrible health.
Because even at the worst of times, like during Covid, there are blessings.
