This afternoon I left the house for the first time in about 27 years. It was a dash to the supermarket to buy ingredients for the first dinner I’ve cooked in about that long, too. A lot has changed in these, well okay, 12 days: Traffic is thin, cafes and shops are shuttered, and Bombay onions are 200,000 rupiah (US$14) a kilo.
You can’t get tested easily for Covid-19 in Bali. As of today, just 10 cases have been confirmed on the island. (For Indonesia as a whole, a country of around 260 million, 6,500 tests have been carried out in total.) So I don’t know that I’ve had it and that undermines my description of the past few weeks. But my experience and trajectory matches a lot of what I have read about confirmed cases. Read on only if you can keep that in mind.
When I developed a sudden cough and tight chest on the night of Wednesday, March 11, after tacos and margaritas with my yoga teacher colleagues, schools were still open and flights were operating normally. I was supposed to fly to Australia that same night; the rational argument to not go was that I shouldn’t risk taking the virus straight to my 70+ year old parents, and then the 30-year high school reunion I was going down for was cancelled at the last minute as well. But I just had a gut feeling anyway that I shouldn’t go, and I cancelled the prior day.
So when I told my husband about the cough, the odd tightness in my upper chest and upper back, and my clamminess at precisely 11pm that Wednesday night, I should have been on a flight. (Passengers in my row, and the two rows in front and behind me, you’re welcome.) Because I write a few daily aviation news wraps, I am buried in headline news each day. The previous week I’d watched the daily news increasingly pour from the standard sections in one wrap over into the new “Coronavirus” section, till no news stories remained in the standard section at all. Because I also work at a school, I was reading about symptoms and precautions and developments each day as well. My first thought when I started coughing was: This doesn’t feel like I’m coming down with something normal. This feels odd but ha, what are the chances of this being Covid-19? There was ONE confirmed case in Bali then.
Because I was supposed to be in Australia, I was off the yoga teaching schedule for the week, so I could lay low without feeling like a drama queen. The kids had two half-days at school, so I kept them home just in case. I did a few grocery shops, I went to the beach, thinking maybe this is it, but probably it isn’t. When I walked up the street at my usual pace, I was out of breath. Otherwise the cough remained there, more as a crouch at the top of my lungs waiting to spring into action than anything debilitating. If I hadn’t been breathing coronavirus headlines in day in, day out, I would have continued life completely as normal.
On Sunday night, school announced it was closing. On Wednesday morning at 3am, a precise week give or take a few hours after the cough started, I woke wracked with bad flu-like aches all over and a low-grade fever. Panadol helped, but the pains came raging back an hour or two before each due dose. The fatigue was so bad that when I called the Sanglah hospital hotline to ask about Covid-19 testing, when they wanted to give me another number to call, I had to hang up as I couldn’t move to get a pen to write it down. Stu had brought forward his trip to KL as flights were starting to be cancelled at this point and he needed to collect his new visa; he wasn’t back till late that night. My friend Susanne, a nurse in Sydney, gave directions to my daughter to monitor me (thanks Susanne!)
Thursday was a replica of the day before, a mess of sweat, aches and fatigue that Panadol reduced for a few hours at a time. Friday the aches lifted, but over the course of a few hours they were replaced with a sore chest and lungs. When I took a full breath, my whole chest cavity hurt afterwards. The tops of my lungs — front and back — ached even though I was hardly coughing at all. Saturday, my chest and lungs improved suddenly — everything with this illness came and went suddenly, like waves — and I thought I was better.
Sunday I rested, still in bed, and developed a headache and the clamminess persisted. Monday I woke without a headache, instead just feeling plain sick, weak and nauseous, able only to get to the bathroom and back to bed. Tuesday all I could eat or drink was ginger tea and I languished in bed, not even getting a bounce from Panadol that let me scroll headlines.
“I’m really scared,” I told Stu. I wasn’t getting better and was sliding into feeling even worse. I didn’t want to go to hospital, as being tested would involve admission into isolation while waiting for test results, said to be taking four or five days. The headlines were full of stories at this point emphasising how an increasing number of Covid-19 patients were in their 20s to 50s, healthy and with no underlying health issues. I could still breathe fully, even with a tight chest, and clung to that as an indicator that I didn’t really need to start writing letters about how to live good lives to my kids. Susanne called and talked me back from the edge. She told me it was a good sign that I could speak in full sentences. She got me to drink some juice. And again, just as everything else had come and gone, something shifted and lifted and I felt dramatically better as the evening hit. I slept through the whole night, and when I woke, I wasn’t sweating. I had a fuzzy mouth with a terrible taste for the next 24 hours. It was the virus’s last surge.
Eventually I will be able to take a test that will show whether or not I had Covid-19. If I had it, know this: You should be afraid of it. When I fell ill, I had never been in such good shape in my life; but even so, I am not sure I was ever sicker.
Wash your hands. Stay home.