A week ago Monday, I texted my editors and said I wouldn’t be able to cover police briefing the next morning.
That nagging cough I’d gone to my doctor about was back and worse than ever. Now, I had a slight fever and no energy. I needed to go back to the doctor who had assured me two weeks earlier I wasn’t contagious.
Soon after getting an appointment came a follow-up call.
Had I traveled recently to an area with known local spread of COVID-19, come into close contact with someone with a lab-confirmed COVID-19 diagnosis in the past 14 days or had a fever or symptoms of lower respiratory illness, such as a cough, shortness or breath or difficulty breathing?
I hadn’t been around anyone with confirmed COVID-19, but I had been to Omaha, which had just reported the state’s first confirmed case a few days earlier. And I had that cough and couldn’t seem to catch my breath.
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Suddenly, I was a “priority care” patient.
My doctor’s office asked me to go to Autumn Ridge Family Medicine, near 27th and Superior streets, and called to tell them I was coming. At the door, they gave me a mask to put on. They checked my vitals, weighed me. Did all the regular stuff they do at a doctor’s appointment for a cough that won’t go away.
Some tests came back quickly. It wasn't Influenza A or B or a handful of other viruses.
The doctor came in, listened to my lungs and ordered a chest X-ray. Soon after, he was talking to me about infiltrates, little invader substances that showed up in the image of cloudy-looking lungs that shouldn’t look cloudy.
It was a classic sign of pneumonia, he said. But also of the new coronavirus strain. They didn’t know which.
Either way, it was almost noon on March 10, and I was headed to Bryan West Campus for what I was told probably would be two or three days but turned out to be six.
While heading home to grab some essentials, the hospital called and told me to have my boyfriend pull up to the emergency room doors and wait there. They’d come out to get me, with my mask on.
Two friendly, young women in protective gear — gowns and masks and gloves — pushed out a wheelchair for me and rolled me inside. Staff closed off hospital corridors as I was escorted to a sixth-floor room, a unit for those who need a bit less care than the ICU.
It was, admittedly, a little scary, despite my nurse being very reassuring, telling me I wasn’t the only one going through this.
Within minutes, there was a flurry of yellow gown-wearing staff taking vitals, drawing blood, getting an IV started, small ovals of their faces visible, like in a disaster movie.
I was in isolation, a negative-flow room. No visitors. A couple of times, the doctor called the room to talk to me.
And it wasn’t without a bit of confusion or miscommunication. While President Trump talked on TV about anyone who wants a test getting one, I was waiting to hear if the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention thought my symptoms were deserving enough of testing. If not, the doctor told me, the state health department still could choose to have it done.
First, they wanted to see a CT scan, to see a better X-ray image of my lungs.
I was told the long, skinny swab that looked a little like a Q-tip and already had been poked uncomfortably deep up my nose would be sent to Omaha on Wednesday morning to be tested.
Overnight, I was told they may need to do it again, this time one from each nostril and one from my throat. When that hadn’t happened by mid-afternoon Wednesday, I asked and learned the original test had been sent off.
(By Friday, the Nebraska Department of Health and Human Services had issued an update to labs and hospitals letting them know that only one nasal swab was required.)
By then, it had become clear that, until they could figure out what it was — or at least what it wasn’t — I was in a bit of a holding pattern, because patients with pneumonia and COVID-19 don’t get the same treatment, even if some of the symptoms are similar.
It was Wednesday night before doctors started me on antibiotics.
I’d brought a book and an iPad, but I spent much of that first couple of days sleeping between tests and needle pokes, my body doing what it could to repair itself with the help of the oxygen tube going up my nose.
My boyfriend texted me after seeing a woman piling up toilet paper in a cart at Leon’s. “It’s a thing,” he said she told him, when he couldn’t help smiling.
“No, it’s not,” he told her.
As weird as it seemed being in a hospital room I couldn’t leave, people on the outside were flipping out, buying up more chicken than they’d eaten in a month and so many bottles of water. I’m still not clear why.
Then, at 6:14 p.m. Thursday, my nurse came in — without her protective gear — and told me the best news, which I quickly texted.
“I don’t have COVID-19!!!”
I wasn’t healthy yet. But it felt like I’d just cleared a huge hurdle.
By midnight, they were moving me to another unit for patients with less-serious needs. That first night, I was all alone. But over the next few days, as I worked with a team of hard-working respiratory therapists who came and went helping me to get my lungs back to breathing without making a crackle through the stethoscope, the unit filled up.
The lung doctor started me on steroids on Friday and ordered more tests to try to get to the bottom of what caused my pneumonia. The next day, he told me how half of the time it’s never clear why.
I was discharged Sunday at noon, not yet knowing why I’d gotten pneumonia, but knowing that I’d listen more closely to my body and not write off all coughs as allergies.
I know it was unfortunate timing, to put it mildly, to show up at a clinic, then the hospital, with symptoms that matched COVID-19. If I’d had the same symptoms a year ago, who knows if it would’ve meant a six-day stay in the hospital. Maybe not.
What I do know is that the hard-working women and men in health care on the front lines are doing what they can to try to prevent the spread of a disease they’re still learning about. I understand.
And today, I see a whole lot more value in the positive — friends retweeting videos of Italians singing to strangers from their balconies and posting photos of their families and pets riding out the proverbial storm together — than in a stockpile of Charmin.
Public safety reporter Lori Pilger's memorable stories from 2019
Lori Pilger's most memorable: Aubrey Trail trial coverage
It felt important to help readers in Lincoln and elsewhere keep tabs on this unusual case that took place in Wilber and involved a young Lincoln woman.
Lori Pilger's most memorable: Piecing together Chick-fil-A chaos
We sought to find out more about Joseph Cimino’s final days and hours and the mental health issues he faced before he rammed a Chick-fil-A at lunch time.
Lori Pilger's most memorable: A unique legal defense
I hadn’t seen a defense quite like this one so I wanted to share it with readers. An Atkinson man’s attorney fought, unsuccessfully, to raise a religious defense at his trial for harboring illegal immigrants in the O’Neill area.
Lori Pilger's most memorable: Lincoln Regional Center changes
This story was about how one woman’s situation led to changes about the medical treatment patients get at the Lincoln Regional Center going forward.
Lori Pilger's most memorable: Closer look at fatal shooting
Any time someone is killed in their home by intruders, it’s shocking. I wanted to try to give readers an inside look at the police investigation.