My 5-Year-Old Had COVID & Here’s What We Can All Learn
It’d been a “big” weekend, and by that I mean my daughters ages 8, 5, and 3 had spent the night with their grandparents on Saturday night. They swam. They ate pancakes and ice cream and bacon and watched TV; they played with toys and went to bed late, so I wasn’t completely shocked when Monday morning, my five-year-old, Eilie, woke up feeling “blah”.
That was it; Eilie was just blah. Her face felt warm, not hot (I didn’t even bother checking her temperature), and she just wanted to lay around and watch TV. Because she’s in kindergarten and the school doesn’t want sick kids being sent in (a policy I support), I kept her home.
Eilie spent the day sucking down Honest juice boxes and watching TV; despite her malaise, she didn’t even take a nap. At one point, though, Eilie came to me and said, “My whole body is achy,” which was…atypical.
After I picked her sister up from school, I decided to give Eilie an at-home COVID test throughout which she flailed and screamed and did not let me get the requisite 15-second-per-nostril sample for the test. None the less, the test immediately showed a positive result.
Disbelieving, a short while later, with help this time, I tested her again using a kit from a different test box. This test, too, was instantly positive.
Shocked, resigned, and anxious — would the rest of us get sick? Would she be okay? — I contacted the school. I chewed my nails thinking of the Medscape headlines I’d just seen in my e-mail…that children are the primary carriers and spreaders of the Delta variant, that children’s hospitals had seen a 500% increase in adolescent patients that week alone. Would she or one of my precious other two daughters be among those children?
I tucked Eilie in to sleep hoping that I would not have to even glimpse down the terrifying gauntlet that is a suffering child.
The next morning, my Eilie woke me up. “I feel great today! My cheeks are cool!”
Yep. There she was. Bright-eyed and bushy-tailed. Kittens and rainbows. Feeling fine. Did I make a mistake?
I’d already raised the red flags with the school and anyone else who may have been exposed the night before following the initial two positive at-home tests, but she felt so well. What if…I did it wrong?
We went to Urgent Care. We were lucky enough to be first in line — Urgent Cares have two-hour waits at minimum after the doors open these days — and quickly confirmed that Eilie was indeed COVID+
Oh…kay. It was a legit COVID diagnosis. Eilie, my sweet little rainbow baby had COVID, and by all accounts, she felt fabulous.
This presentation of impeccable health continued for the subsequent, requisite ten-day quarantine period. As for the rest of us…we all felt fine. Normal. We were fine. Three days. Five days. Past the incubation period noted by the nurse at Urgent Care. My oldest child passed a COVID test the Sunday after Eilie tested positive. How had four out of five people under the same roof nor either of my parents not been affected at all?
And that’s when it hit me…Eilie is one of those silent carriers because let’s be frank…had she not mentioned the body aches, had I not had the inclination to test her…she’d have bounced back to school the previous Tuesday without a second thought, and she’d have continued going to school every day that thus followed.
In other words, I would have unwittingly sent my COVID+ daughter into her kindergarten class without even knowing I was culpable in spreading the virus.
With that revelation, I came to conclude that:
1. The at-home tests are reliable and useful as they keep us out of the Urgent Cares and doctor officers.
2. It’s smart to test if you show signs and symptoms of feeling unwell just to be on the safe side.
3. If you’ve been exposed, be mindful of how you feel and consider checking yourself after the incubation period just to be on the safe side.
Basically, what I am taking from this is that we do have a due diligence of responsibility to not transport the virus if we can avoid it. Was it inconvenient to stay home with three seemingly healthy children when I needed to be working? Absolutely! But it’s also terrifying to know that we could’ve been the reason someone else’s child or mom or dad or sister or brother ended up in the hospital or worse because during the timeframe we were quarantined, my 40-year-old cousin was hospitalized with COVID and related pneumonia; a highly-valued friend of many of my friends in his late-30s, early-40s lost his life; a pregnant 32-year-old labor and delivery nurse didn’t survive her battle with the virus.
Basically, we got lucky, but not everyone gets lucky. For those of us who are lucky, we can and should do what we can to protect the ones who might not be as lucky because honestly…until something happens, we don’t know the lucky ones from the unlucky ones.
