Corona Diaries - 3

After getting the swab done, we all headed our separate ways. Three of us went to our office to discuss what our next step would be. I was terrified to go home and possibly infect my family or put them at risk. One of our colleagues lived with her husband in a small apartment and she couldn’t be isolated properly, therefore we were trying to find a solution until the swab result was out. We contacted the one hotel that was advertising free accommodation for healthcare workers and were waiting for an answer. We discussed our fears and worries, how we felt and somehow all being in the same situation made it feel somewhat lighter. Misery loves company; so does worry I’ve come to realise. When you worry alone, it becomes very heavy. When you share you worry with someone else, it becomes lighter and more manageable. We all left the office feeling a little bit better. I remember telling the girls as I locked my office:

“Let me take my laptop. I don’t know when I’ll be coming here next.”

Little did I know, that if I didn’t take my laptop, it would still be stuck in my office behind my locked glass door and I might not be sitting here writing this for all you beautiful readers.

I drove home with a heavy heart. I spent the drive contemplating how I would react to the swab result. What if my result was positive? What if it were negative? Somehow, a positive result didn’t scare me. A positive result would mean I would need admission and I would keep my family safe at home. A negative result would be terrifying. A negative result means isolation, home quarantine or possibly going back to work with extra precautions and living in fear until the next swab. I wondered how the non-medical person would react to the matter. I’m sure they would think having a positive result would be more catastrophic. For me, it was the opposite. It’s funny how our perspective changes and how everyone perceives things so differently.

The 15 minute drive home dragged into hours in my overthinking brain. I’ve been listening to national songs ever since the corona era started for some reason. I remember everything stopped becoming normal during the National/Liberation Day leave; that’s February 25 and 26 for the readers from outside Kuwait. I always get a feeling of nostalgia whenever I listen to national songs. A lot of them bring tears to my eyes. It reminds me of listening to these songs when I was abroad and I would always tear up. Any person who has ever lived abroad, studied abroad or spent any length of time away from Kuwait will understand this feeling. National songs are a piece from back home and when you hear them it brings back that feeling; when you’re abroad and alone, they make you feel less alone. You feel like you belong. So, I spent the ride with tears in my eyes listening to:

انا جالس في مكاني ... نائم مطمئن

و هنالك من يعاني ... من أجل ان لا نئن

شكرا للبواسل ... ابطال الوطن

شكرا للمقاتل ... و حماة الوطن

شكرا للنساء ... الأم و الفتاة

شكرا لربان الوطن

انتم سور لا يزول ... رابع لا بل أهم

انتم عون لا يقول ... ولا يخسر امل

هناك بالصف الأمامي ... هناك حيث يكمن حزامي

اقف و ظهري مستقيم ... مستقيم ... مستقيم

اقف و عيني لا تميل ... لا تميل ... لا تميل

يتعبون لأجلنا و لا ينتظرون ثناء

كغيمة في سماء

كنسمة في هواء

كدواء لكل داء

I locked myself in my room as soon as I arrived home. I tried to get some sleep since I hadn’t slept at all overnight. My family kept talking to me behind the locked door and I refused to open the door or see them. I lay down and started to feel a little bit warm. I checked my temperature and it was 38. This was the first time I checked my temperature. I didn’t know whether it was anxiety or just a regular flu. As I lay there terrified, I opened the latest article I was reading about COVID-19 and went through the symptoms and began to correlate if I had any of them.

Let me take you back to the beginning of my symptoms. As I said previously, thinking back retrospectively, you can put it all together very easily, but when you’re actually living them, they don’t come together as easily. Being a physician, it was easy to put it all together, because that’s how we diagnose patients. We get different information from patient history, clinical examination, lab investigations and radiological imaging. We correlate the information together and try to come up with a diagnosis.

I’ll tell you when my symptoms started exactly. It was Monday April 6th. I started complaining of a headache that I couldn’t shake off. There are certain reasons I get headaches and I’ve started knowing the causes over the past few years. It was either sleep deprivation, because I usually survive on 3-4 hours a night. Another cause was coffee withdrawal, because I sometimes drink 4-5 cold brews a day. With our Amiri Starbucks closed, I’ve been complaining of coffee withdrawal headaches since mid-March. Another cause is keeping my contact lenses in for a long time, causing my eyes to dry out and that gives me a headache too. I didn’t think too much of the headache because there were so many causes for it. The only thing I would say that would differentiate it from any headache, is that it’s persistent and throbbing nature; also nothing really makes it any better. You feel it in the middle of your head and nothing alleviates it. I even got an episode of blurry vision during one bad episode but I just attributed it to not sleeping properly.

The thing I noticed next was I got a sore throat that was very itchy. I felt like I wanted to scratch it. It doesn’t feel like the sore throat you get when it’s the common cold. You feel like you want to scratch your throat internally. It felt scratchy and I became extremely thirsty. I noticed this on Tuesday April 7th. We were oncall and I was covering the day shift, from morning until 10 pm. I remember going back and forth to the office kitchen to fill my water bottle. It seemed that no matter what I drank, my throat was still itchy. It felt like there was something stuck at the back of my throat.

The cough started on the same day. During the oncall, I was sitting in the couch when I started coughing. It started so suddenly and I had just eaten lunch so I thought it was something related to the food. I remember it started hailing all of a sudden when I looked outside the window. It was also dusty that day, so I thought great, I’m coughing because of the dust and change in weather. I kept coughing. It didn’t improve with drinking, it was an irritative dry cough that happened every 5 minutes or so. I made sure to keep my mask on during this time when the juniors would come in to the office. The cough has persisted to this day. Due to the persistent coughing, I started becoming short of breath. I noticed I was out breath after going up one flight of stairs at work. I got mad at myself because I was starting to lose my fitness. This time last year I used to play squash and could easily go up seven flights of stairs without getting out of breath. I promised myself to start running again as soon as the “Corona Era” was over.

You might ask yourself, why did I not think of corona earlier given all these symptoms? I thought it was the common cold. I always get one or two bad ones every year. My last bad flu was in September 2019 and the one before that was March 2019. So, I was due my next big flu. That’s why I didn’t think I had the corona virus.

That night when I went home after the oncall, I felt warm. That’s why I got the thermometer from our cabinet and kept it in my room. My temperature was 37.5 and I didn’t think too much of that. Although, I know for a fact that it’s not my normal temperature. Nearly every morning I get it checked at Amiri doors and its mostly 36. I didn’t check my temperature again until after my swab and that’s when it was 38. I took Panadol and rechecked in an hour and it was still 38. I told my dad that I had a fever and thought there was something wrong with the thermometer. He went to the pharmacy and bought another thermometer. He wanted to check it himself so I would put my ear out the door and he’d check my temperature. I told him to keep cleaning his hands with alcohol and clean the thermometer too. He would literally come to my door every hour to check my temperature. I still didn’t even think that it might be corona.

I was still waiting for the results. The wait was exhausting. I watched Outlander for the third time on Netflix; anything to do with Scotland makes me happy. I reread half of Pride and Prejudice again. I kept asking for our results but they said that there was a backlog in the lab because there was a shortage in reagent so all swabs from Friday would take more than 24 hours. The swabs used to take 6 hours in the beginning of March, now they take up to 48 hours. I stayed locked in my room all night until I finally fell asleep around midnight.

The next day was torture. I got my breakfast and lunch sent to my door. They would leave it on the floor and walk away. I would make sure they left before I took my food in and locked the door again. I wondered was that what prisoners felt like. I felt so alone. I enjoyed eating with company. I didn’t have much of an appetite because of my situation and because I’m not used to eating alone.

That day was torture. It was the longest day ever. I tried to do anything around my room but I couldn’t stay focused on anything. I tried to watch more Outlander. I kept checking my temperature every few hours and it ranged from 37.6 to 38.5. I took Panadol a couple of times. I spoke to my team members, we were all waiting for our results. We were oncall the day after and I couldn’t send our oncall lists until we knew our results. I contacted our head of unit and asked her to try and get someone to cover tomorrow’s oncall just incase our results were not out by the night.

I got the call at 11:30 pm on Saturday April 11th.

“Dr Hawra, I’m sorry to say this but you tested positive for COVID-19. An ambulance will come pick you up in the morning. Please stay isolated until then.”