Against all medical advice, I went to get one more test-my third. The fatigue and brain fog were overwhelming, the chest tightness wasn’t letting up, and a dry, barking cough was making it impossible to sleep. I started calling the directors of prominent labs, interviewing doctors who had cared for coronavirus patients and asking them: How likely was a false negative? And did I have COVID? In the meantime, I was feeling worse and worse. But now I wondered, if it were possible for someone with the virus to test negative for it-and given the politicization of the CDC’s testing guidelines-had we grown too confident in the tests and in our ability to find and isolate infected people? All summer, people I knew were taking tests in order to join friends in beach houses or to visit family if the result came back negative. A new kind of faith had been placed in them. They’d become the key to getting life back to something approaching normal in the absence of a vaccine. Moreover, compared to the early days of the pandemic, the tests had come to mean something different to many people. A quick nose swab and I was home, where, 48 hours later, I received another negative result. I filled out the questionnaire: “Have you experienced any of the following symptoms?” It listed the symptoms of COVID-cough, sore throat, body aches, chills, loss of taste, loss of smell, difficulty breathing. This time, I went to one of the walk-up testing sites the government of Washington, D.C., had set up all over the city. There wasn’t much I could do to convince them, so I decided to get a repeat test. In their minds, they could not have been exposed if I had tested negative-never mind the symptoms I was showing. My friends’ responses surprised me: The vast majority said they felt fine and that they did not feel the need to get tested because my own result had been negative. I told them by text that, even though I tested negative for COVID, I suspected I was infected and encouraged them to get tested.
I was becoming increasingly convinced that I had COVID, so I tried to remember everyone I’d seen in the two weeks before I’d gotten sick in order to warn them that, by coming in contact with me, they might have been exposed. It was the first time I had felt this way while speaking English, rather than a foreign language. A brain fog pulled in, and I found myself constantly searching for simple words. Then my sense of taste would come back, but some things, like sweets, tasted intolerably intense. I could no longer smell my cat’s litter box and ice cream just tasted cold. My senses of taste and smell started fading in and out. Within an hour or two, I’d feel completely fine again. I’d spend most of the day feeling fine, only to have my temperature spike as I swaddled myself in layers of clothing and blankets to fight the chill. Gradually, the symptoms came back-though they never went away, really. But my mother and sister, a doctor who took care of COVID patients at the peak of the pandemic, were adamant: I was to stay home and quarantine for two weeks. I wasn’t feeling awful, just a little under the weather, and now the test confirmed what I wanted to hear: I didn’t have COVID-19. A quick swab of the nose yielded a negative result two days later. I called my primary-care physician’s office in Washington, D.C., and went downtown to their testing site. By morning, I had chills, a runny nose, and a scratchy throat. I barely made it through grocery shopping and had to lie down several times while making dinner. But by Sunday night, it was clear something was wrong.
I waved it off, insisting that I had probably just gone a little too hard on the ab workout. My mother, a doctor who takes great pride in her formidable diagnostic skills, was sure that this was the opening salvo of a COVID infection. I had spent the previous week dealing with excruciating neck pain whose origins I couldn’t quite explain. I first started feeling sick on Sunday night, August 16.
0 kommentar(er)
