Claire, an administrative employee at a Parisian university, caught Covid-19 in March. This 47-year-old mother describes 6 weeks of hell, during which she had to isolate herself in her room so as not to contaminate her husband and three children. She recounts a six-week ordeal.
“I thought the first symptoms appeared around March 12, but, in reality, it started a week earlier. At work, I felt totally exhausted, with a tiny bit of fever, around 37.8 degrees There was nothing alarming about it, but I felt very tired, I remember telling several of my colleagues about it, and then there was also all the anxiety linked to the uncertainty of not knowing what what was going to happen.
It was going all over the place, with those who said that the Covid-19 was nothing. At the same time, I learned a lot about the situation in other countries, such as Italy and China. I feel like I’ve fought a fight at work: 15 days before confinement, I was already telling my colleagues that I didn’t want to shake their hands or kiss them, and I heard the speech : ‘Do not psycho, it’s nothing, it’s just a little flu’. It made me angry.
I lived 6 weeks of hell
I really experienced a feeling of isolation: I think it was the fatigue that resulted from it that made me think that I was not sick, whereas I was. On March 15, the fever rose. I couldn’t get up, I didn’t have enough strength to stand, I had headaches and I vomited several times during the night. I thought I had poorly digested my evening meal, but that was amazing because my husband and children had eaten the same thing and I was the only one with these symptoms.
From that moment, I confined myself to my room. I called my doctor the next day, he told me to stay isolated. Fortunately, we have a house, and therefore room to put all the barrier gestures into effect. From there, I lived 6 weeks of hell. I was in my bed, I couldn’t get up, when I went to the toilet I had to disinfect everything in my path and I was dependent on my husband for meals. I couldn’t get the support I would have liked from my kids because hugs were banned. Then, my husband spoke to me from a distance of two meters, he put my tray down, stayed 3 to 4 minutes with me, and went to take care of the children.
I couldn’t sit
The first week of confinement, he stopped to take care of them, before being placed on partial unemployment by his company. For me, it was one less worry, because I was absolutely in no condition to take care of the children. My symptoms have evolved. Apart from fatigue and fever, I had a little bit of everything: shortness of breath, headaches, concentration problems, memory problems. Despite everything, I continued to work. It allowed me to occupy myself a little, to keep in touch with my colleagues.
The weakness I was feeling meant that after 3 to 4 weeks, when I started going out of my room from time to time to go into the garden, I couldn’t sit up. I couldn’t stay in the sun for long and everything wore me out quickly. I had to spend my days lying in bed, even while working: a habit that I kept. There were also several nights in a row where I was sweating profusely, telling myself that my body was struggling and was going to beat this fever eventually. But the next morning she was still there.
A feeling of vulnerability came over me
I haven’t fully recovered yet, I still feel a certain fatigue and it takes a very big effort to concentrate. Especially since the children sometimes come to ask me, so I have to stop what I’m doing to move on to something else, like homework: I take a lot more time to get back to work afterwards. I try not to forget my tasks so I write down a lot, I make a lot of lists and I use my electronic organizer frequently.
Despite this, I miss, which never happened to me before falling ill: I had a memory that I thought was infallible. With the Covid, a feeling of vulnerability came over me, as well as anxiety. When I was sick, I was scared at times when I couldn’t breathe. I told myself that I had to call the Samu because I might find myself in distress. But, at the same time, I had such a fear of being hospitalized, cut off from my family and my daily life, that I was not going to finish.
‘You’ll make it, you’ll heal on your own, you’ll get there’
It was fueled by the fact that I couldn’t stop myself from watching the news at least once every two days: seeing the reports of people going to the hospital and not coming out was unbearable to me. . I was struggling with myself saying to myself: ‘You will get out of it, you will heal on your own, you will get there, you are well followed by your doctor’. We made a call every two to three days, some of them by video. After a month, when I was still not breathing very well, he asked me to come to his office.
He listened to my lungs, looked at my blood oxygen levels, and told me I was pretty much on the mend and there was nothing to worry about with my lungs. However, to be certain that there was no lesion, it was necessary to do a CT scan. Seen as everything was saturated at the time, I preferred to wait. In the end, I didn’t. Maybe because of the times when I had doubts, especially when I started to get better.
The survival instinct was very strong
Looking back, there was a sort of: ‘It’s actually fine, I’m fine’. As if the disease was a distant memory, as if it had happened at another time in my life, that I hadn’t gone through all these trials and that they hadn’t been so difficult. It seems out of time, out of me. The body has a capacity to rebuild itself, to move on quite impressively: the survival instinct was very strong and obscures these events a little.
With the new symptoms of loss of smell and taste, I thought maybe I didn’t have Covid after all. But when I talk about it with my husband, he tells me that it wasn’t in my head, that I don’t make up memories, that it was very hard and that he was afraid for me. At the time, he didn’t let me know too much about it so as not to add further concern to me. Then, I had the support of my friends, we sent each other WhatsApp messages: it kept me busy, helped me a lot to feel less alone and more understood.
I don’t want to go through that again
Today, I have only one obsession, that of falling ill again. I don’t at all want to relive that: I dream that scientists will quickly find a solution, that it will be settled! Especially since we are not sure that the antibodies to avoid contracting the virus a second time are systematically developed. I would like to do a serological test to be fixed; I will talk to my doctor about it.
For the moment, we continue to be very careful. When he comes home from work, my husband undresses completely at the bottom of the house, takes a shower, changes and then goes up to join us. We do not take transport and we limit contact with the outside world. In short, we find a small neighborhood social life, but the return to life before is not yet topical.
