Page 120 - FDCC Pandemic Book

Living in a Pandemic: A Collection of Stories on Coping, Resilience & Hope
Phoenix in July, but not that toasty. I was a little off, I told myself, but not enough off to leave the safety of my bubble and go “out there,” even for medical attention. I got progressively worse. That week, I had gone from running 3 miles a day and weightlifting to having trouble getting out of bed for my obligatory four or five nightly trips to the bathroom. Something was wrong.
By the next morning, I was running a high fever and felt miserable. Joyce, my wife and hospital nurse of 45 years, watched me go from bad to worse overnight. She took me to a local hospital where I was loaded onto a gurney and wheeled into a temporarily constructed triage room. Family was not allowed in the hospital and I was fading in and out of consciousness. I recall that a physician briefly visited me, pronounced me with “presumptive COVID-19” stuck a swab up my nose and told me I was not sick enough to qualify for a “rapid result” test so I should go home and call back in 5 days for the results. A nurse’s aide transferred me to a wheelchair and unceremoniously dumped me on the street corner, telling me I should probably call someone for a ride home.
It is noteworthy that, even though trained medical personnel in the hospital were not willing, figuratively or literally, to give me the time of day, my family was willing to risk their own lives to help me. I had been (presumptively) diagnosed with COVID-19 but they would not leave my side, taking shifts sitting next to me, just watching and waiting, without regard for their own health or their exposure to the deadly virus. I do not deserve them but am damn glad to have them.
Joyce was sufficiently worried that she asked Alison and my son, Matthew, to stay with us and help out, just in case. Good thing apparently. The night after I was summarily discharged from the hospital, during one of my several 71-year-old man trips to the bathroom, I had a seizure. I was told (no memory of it) that Alison was surreptitiously following behind me when I passed out. She caught my head just before it would have thumped on the tile floor like a cantaloupe. After that, things get a little foggy for me.
So as not to unnecessarily worry me, there was apparently quite a bit going on behind the scenes (out of my hearing and sight, such as they were) to save me. Hospitals were full and workers on the brink of exhaustion. “You can bring him in Mrs. Christian but there will be a considerable wait in the lobby before we can evaluate him.” They had lost their capacity to heal, and their ability to feel. They could only act, and react, to situations as they arose in real time. If I died at home before my COVID test results came back, well, I was just one of many who would do so without notice or fanfare.
But...it so happens that my former brother-in-law, notwithstanding being my former brother-in-law, had the will and the capacity to heal. He saved my life. After being turned away from medical help, time and again, Joyce called him, sobbing and
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