On May 15, we both tested positive for Covid 19. We both had felt they we had had the Coronavirus weeks if not months ago, and were surprised to still test positive. We were onboard Brick House in Hout Bay in a marina, South Africa from February 2, 2020.
It is difficult to narrow where we caught the virus, because it is difficult to say exactly when it was contracted and when our symptoms really were covid-19 symptoms and not something else. I had read early that the symptoms varied widely..it’s not just a fever, and shortness of breath. We had no fevers and no shortness of breath in the beginning. I took our temperatures twice a day early on.
On March 23, we both felt that we possibly had started it. Patrick developed an extreme sore throat, had more headaches than he normally would, and some sniffles. After 2 weeks of quarantining, taking some minor vitamins and gargling many times a day, it went away. He never had another symptom until May 12. The only medication he took was a baby aspirin every day, and a half a dose of regular multivitamins most days. He exercised every day, hiking up Chapman’s Peek to the toll booth, doing 100 sit-ups and 100 push ups each day. We walked together to the grocery store each day for some more exercise and he often carried the bulk of our groceries back. I tried to feed both of us more vegetables and less sugar during this period, just to be a little healthier. He was very impressed with himself after 2 weeks to have kicked it, as my symptoms lingered, and he encouraged me to exercise more…
On March 23, I had started to have severe hip pains. I could hardly walk, but I did to try to walk it out. I had never had anything wrong with my hips, and friends told me it sounded like I was a candidate for hip replacement. What? First in one hip, then 2 days later gone, and in the other hip, for a total of about 5 or 6 days. This was not after any harsh exercise. Then I developed an extreme cotton ball in my throat. Not sore…but incessant clearing of my throat day and night. Nothing helped. Then after about 10 days, my chest became heavy feeling. For several nights around this time, I stayed up, sitting up for about 3 nights in a row, researched what hospital to go to if I had an emergency, contemplated waking Patrick to go to a hospital, and then finally succumbing to sleep. I wasn’t experiencing shortness of breath, but I was very worried I would not wake up, and would not breathe by morning. I tried to put off sleep til Patrick would wake in the morning because maybe then he would be hear me if I did stop breathing, and be able to help me.
The heaviness in my chest continued for weeks and I remember by the end of April I put myself on an antibiotic because my spit was white and bubbly, which google told me can indicate pneumonia. I took just the right antibiotic for pneumonia and figured if it did not go away, then I had a viral pneumonia (covid-19), and not a bacterial pneumonia that the antibiotic would cure. It was not cured, and I continued with a heavy chest and white bubbly spit in to May, June, and now less so in July. In May, I did experience shortness of breath, but I attributed it to anxiety over Patrick. I had all I could do to get to the head, 4 feet away from where I was lying, or to fix myself food. I layed on my stomach often as recommended, did lots of breathing exercizes, and was scared shitless. I had heard about a symptom of losing sense of taste or small. But on Tuesday which was probably the worst day, food people were bring me was so salty I could hardly eat it. I ate in anyways because I was starving and knew I needed it.. Someone brought a cupcake to me, and with the frosting scraped off, it was still so sweet I could not finish it.I had not lost my sense of taste…it had Beene extremely exaggerated! I remembered the last few days Patrick was here on the boat with it, the same thing happened to him, and suddenly my usually adequate cooking became inedible to him. Unsalted eggs, were too salty. He hadn’t hesitated to tell me how bad my cooking was…hypoxia was doing the talking. That same week I developed tinnitus so badly I had to blare the stereo to drown it out. Constant high pitch screaming, on and off for days. I read it was possibly from stress.my ear was gurgling and popping. The same one I had had the test in. Within days the ear lost all hearing, and was totally blocked up, and had short jolts of pain. My breathing remained labored. Upon my adamant request, the US embassy doctor I was speaking to multiple times during the day, sent a pulse oximeter to me to monitor my oxygen level. It was in the low 90s at this point, never below 91%. We didn’t know my baseline before this, except the 98% the day I was tested, and the doctor felt this was acceptable.. my pulse was 90 and 100 which is said to be very poor for my sex and age.
I never had a temperature about 100.0 F. I had bouts of a sore throat, headaches which I get occasionally anyways. Besides the antibiotic, I never took anything else. I continued with my normal regimen of vitamins which included 2000 mg of vitamin C, a regular woman’s vitamin, magnesium, and an occasional vitamin.
So where did we catch it? I really don’t know. If we truly had it from March 23, then it could have been anything from the grocery store, to the hardware store we went to for boat parts, masks and hand sanitizer. It could have been the public bus we took to Cape Town to renew our visas, or the crowded visa renewal office. It could have been from carefully handing out a sandwich to the hungry local people near our location, or from the open air market we went to for an occasional meal, or the inside restaurants we went to. We don’t remember anyone coughing or appearing sick, but of course the coronavirus is MOST contagious when people have absolutely no symptoms yet, unlike the common flu.
If we didn’t get it before lockdown started in South Africa (March 26) , then the grocery store, or the hardware store, or the handing food to local people would likely be about the only place we could have gotten it, because that’s all we did during lockdown. I suppose if could have been an ATM, or the cellular store we went to get extra internet too just before we locked down. If we got it during lockdown at any time, those are the only places we could have gotten it. Or from the yacht club bathroom we showered in. Nobody at the yacht club ever shower symptoms, yet all could have been asymptomatic too. I don’t think we will ever really know.as lockdown continue, local township people got visibly thinner, and we did hand out more food. They had gone from asking for money to asking for bread. We were always very careful washing hands, wearing masks etc, though of course our minds like many wandered from being very nervous about it, to wondering if it was even real.
On May 11, we got permission to move the boat to Cape Town, for “an emergency haulout”. There had been a small leak on Brick House for some time, and Patrick had managed to finally find it. We wanted to depart the next week for parts unknown…Namibia, St Helena, Brazil, and south…so we fully stocked the boat, fueled the boat, and were ready to go after this small repair was made.
We hauled out on Friday, he did the small one man repair in the stern, and then launched on Monday. He drove the boat in to the assigned slip. He then, unlike any time in the past, allowed me to tie the boat and did not check the lines, add snubber etc. He did plug the boat in, and then went to bed. I just figured he was tired after the work he had done on the weekend.
When I came in from my exercise on Tuesday morning, and took his temperature, it was 102.9.
I googled flu vs covid. It was indeed flu season in S Africa at this point, and there weren’t too many cases of covid-19, and we had felt we had already had thr coronavirus. Google says a quick spike in temperature, rather than a slow rise, was more likely flu, among other things in the comparison chart. He said it felt like a mild flu, better than many flu he had and felt it was a waiting game to get better. He took Tylenol to reduce the fever, which helped. Gave him lots of fluid, cooked whatever he wanted to eat which wasn’t much. He proceeded with body aches, the fever, headache, and sore throat. He was happy that he had no congestion as he usually develops a sinus infection when he gets the flu, and it want in his head at all. I suggested he go to the doctors to make sure it wasn’t covid, but he convinced me that from everything we read, they didn’t want to see you for coronavirus unless you were having trouble breathing, had travelled to an infected area in the last 14 days, or were in direct contact with a confirmed case. None of these applied at all. But I did get him to agree on Wednesday night that if not feeling remarkably better by Saturday morning, that we would go in.
However, by Thursday afternoon he had developed a dry cough. He still had all of the symptoms. I was getting very worried at that point, but he didn’t want to go to a doctor to be told he had a flu. A rather mild polite flu as he described it. He also had diarrhea by now. I had some too…we figured it was the soup I made that afternoon, or the chicken and rice from the night before.
By Friday morning, I was more than concerned. He was coughing more. He was showing no signs of improvement. Still he said his breathing was fine, that he felt nothing in his chest. I don’t know…typical guy not in touch with his body? Loving husband not wanting to worry his wife…Hours later, he was coughing so bad, he could barely spit out that he could breathe. He did manage to say yes he could breathe through his nose, but he agreed to go to the hospital.
He said I needed to do his laundry first, so to avoid a fight, I did a rush job of his laundry. And he said we must walk there because we could both use the exercise. I looked at google maps and I said absolutely not…a 2 mile walk in the rain was NOT in the cards.
We called an uber, kept his head hanging out the window to be sure, and got to the hospital. He wanted some bottled water first, so I went in to the lobby of the hospital to buy some water from a vendor there, and to ask where emergency was. A polite young man took us around to the screening tent outside of the emergency room.
Upon arrival to this screening tent, Patrick was told to pull his mask up around his nose, and he managed to communicate that he couldn’t. He couldn’t breathe with the mask on. There was a bit of a struggle to get him to pull up the mask, and he was given a lighter surgical mask to put on. His blood pressure was taken…it wasn’t his usual 105 or 110…it was 210! His blood oxygen saturation level was 83%. It should be 95-98%. At 80% the doctors panic. They got him in to the emergency room and put an oxygen mask on him. I wasn’t allowed in…my blood pressure was 140, higher than my normal 100-105. My oxygen saturation level was about 93%-95%.
I was then asked, while I sat outside if I wanted a covid 19 swab test too. I responded I would IF it got me in to the room Patrick was in. They told me that it would, and I went right in. Patrick was already feeling better with the oxygen mask on and his oxygen level was already better.
We were told he was very very sick, close to cardiac arrest, and the oxygen level was a big problem. They layed him prone, and gave him blood thinners, and prepared him for the ICU. Neither one of us could believe he was to be admitted, and to the ICU nonetheless. The ambulance soon came and took him to an available bed at Groote Schuur Hospital nearby. We held hands as the door to the ambulance closed. We promised eachother, no ventilators. We had read the statistics.
That night I was called and told we were both positive for Covid 19.
During the weekend, Patrick was uncharacteristically grumpy and rude to the staff, complaining about the food, and the care. The doctor asked me to bring some food for him. I called local friends until I found someone who could bring him some food and a cell phone so I could possible talk to him.
After a very rocky weekend with quickly escalating oxygen solutions, I was called on Monday to be told they really needed to put him on a ventilator. I wasn’t asked…I was told. When I asked about just bring him home (to the boat)…no…no hospitalized Covid patience could die at home. They told me without the ventilator, he would die that evening. They told me with the ventilator , it would support his body until his immune system could battle the virus, that they had lost very few people on a ventilator that didn’t have preexisting morbity factors. We spoke about issues he had had in the past…which was really just heart arythmia caused only by alcohol, discovered 7 years previously and not experienced since. They said he had an excellent baseline, the body of someone 20 years younger, and that they wouldn’t have allocated a ventilator to him unless they felt it would help him. So I was allowed to talk with him on the phone. He yelled right away it was a bad time to call. I explained that they had to put him on the ventilator for a little while, and that he should not fight it, and that I loved him very much and would be waiting for him to wake up. He yelled at me to not call him again. The grumpiness was the oxygen deprivation. Then I heard him yell OWWWWWW…probably the shot to sedate him. Those were the last words I ever heard him say.
He passed on June 8, with me by his side. More can be seen on this video:
I am mostly recovered now….on July 8, 2020, nearly 2 months after diagnosis, 3.5 months after feeling like I first had symptoms. I have always had weak lungs…even in the best of times, walking and hiking. Never any formal diagnosis. I never pass the spirometry tests during a physical. Many doctors have told me that many people do not, and it’s not the best test anyways…to not worry about it.
I have an appointment for a physical tomorrow. Mostly to see why I still have heaviness in my chest at night. I am researching today which tests I should have, and what to ask the doctor. I am trying to take progressively more strenuous walks, and adding inclines in to the mix. I am listening to my body, not pushing myself too hard, but trying to do a little more every day. A medical friend of mine tells me I am lucky to have not died with this thing. I feel lucky. I wish Patrick had been lucky too.
He somehow made sure to leave me with a completely perfect seaworthy boat, every last thing done, in the safest marina in Cape Town. He had encouraged me to learn how to drive on the left in Richards Bay. He has taught me so much over the years on how to care for the boat, and operate it.
As I struggle to maintain the boat, give up some of the control to professional captains and repairman to keep the boat perfect, and continue to improve it….I feel him with me, guiding me with the repairs, guiding me with the process, and guiding me with the decisions I make along the way.The only person that can ever fill his boots is me, and I am working every area I can to try to do that. Life must go on. Some say he walks beside me. I feel more that he walks within me. I feel stronger, tougher and more competent than ever before. Thank you Patrick for all that you have given me. I will sail on with you forever, and will always remember what you have done for me in this life.
Coronavirus Onboard Update 5/28 – Day 15 of Hell
Cruising with a Cat onboard…the other side of the story…
