Chris
PHOTOGRAPH BY MORGANA WINGARD
CENTER MORICHES, NEW YORK: Our company was doing a medical conference at the Westin in Times Square. I set up on February 27th and people started coming that night. By Saturday the 29th, I just didn’t feel good. The next morning, I woke up drenched with sweat. I could feel I was running a little fever. I took some DayQuil to get me through the day. On Sunday, March 1st, I still felt crappy and started to have a little bit of a cough. When I got home, the cough started getting worse. That Monday after I woke up, I urinated blood twice. I called my doctor and said, “Look, I don't feel good. It’s been two days and it's getting worse.” I went in and she tested me for the flu. It came back negative right away because I get the flu shot every year. She said, “It's definitely something viral.”
People had just started talking about Coronavirus. We weren't on any lockdown, nothing. We weren't social distancing. Nobody was wearing a mask or anything. So she told me, “Look, if your fever gets worse, take Tylenol. If it's viral, there's no antibiotics. There's no magic pill. Get lots of fluid and lots of rest.”
We were supposed to do this big Javits Center show. It was the international aesthetic and cosmetic show—tens of thousands of people attend that. And then we started wondering if the show was gonna still go on. Saturday night they postponed it because there would be too many people.
I went back to my doctor on Monday night because my wife said, “You've been sick for 11 days. You're never sick. This is like three to three times longer than you've ever been sick. Something's not right.” She was kind of hounding me to get tested. I said, “I don't have it.”
My doctor only had 10 kits from Labcorps at that time. Kits were impossible to get. She agreed to test me. Then she said, “You and your wife have to be quarantined until we get the results.” I thought, really? This is terrible. So, I went home and we quarantined.
I stayed home that whole week and then Friday the 13th I got a call from my doctor. She said, “You tested positive.” Now by then, no more fever. I just had the dry cough. All the other symptoms were gone by the end of the weekend. That following Monday, I had no cough left, but my lung function wasn’t great. I was using a lung function meter and we were looking at our oxygen levels with the pulse oximeter. The Suffolk County department of health services came by to give us masks and a thermometer. They said, “Treat everyone in your house like you all have it.” My wife tested negative for it, but she did have a lot of the same symptoms.
Family and neighbors dropped stuff off on the front stoop. We put a sign up “Don't touch the door” because even though we were cleaning it, we didn't want to take any chances. They would leave something and walk back ten feet. A couple of times when we got deliveries, the delivery person stopped in their tracks and said, “Do you mind going inside?”
We were under quarantine from the 9th until I got the letter from the Suffolk County department health services on the 24th that I'd been 14 days with no symptoms, more than three days with no fever, no fever reducing medicine, and that I was free of quarantine. For the first week when I did go somewhere, I carried that letter that I was free of quarantine with me just kind of to show people, you know?
I went to a lab in Farmingdale to get tested on Wednesday, March 25th, to confirm I was negative. At the same time, I emailed Mount Sinai to donate plasma. I drove into the city on Friday the 27th, took their blood tests, and took another COVID-19 swab test. They called me back on Saturday, the 28th of March and said, “Good news. You're negative.” That was my first official negative twenty days after I was originally tested.
After I donated at Mount Sinai on that Friday, I got a call on Tuesday from the clinic that tested me that my first test on the 25th was still positive. So on March 25th, I had no symptoms, no anything, and I still tested positive. Two days later, on the 27th, I tested negative. That means I probably had it for around 26 days.
I felt hesitant about joining the survivors group because I don't feel like a survivor. My wife said a couple of times, “I thought you were going to have to go to the hospital. I thought I would lose you.” I guess it does go through one's mind. It never went through my mind though. I thought, “I'm not a survivor. I got over it.” And then I started looking at all the symptoms that I had: from the blood and the urine, the coughing, the fever, the loss of everything. I didn't have to go to the hospital. I was fortunate. I didn't have to go on the ECMO machine that takes the oxygen from your blood.
They said that at the conference, there were a couple of people, including myself, that came down with it. Suffolk County now has over 40,000 cases. I was within the first 50 to 75 people in all of Suffolk County to have it and probably the first half a dozen in all of Brookhaven to have it. When you look at it now it's really sobering to know how quickly it spread.
I felt strongly about giving back through plasma donations to help others especially those who were truly sick and could pass away. My friend and her husband survived after being on life support and the ECMO machine. A doctor friend of mine who came down with COVID-19 had a plasma infusion and he said it helped him turn the corner in recovering. How could you not want to help by donating? I’ve now donated plasma eight times in ten weeks. I hope this helps and I am able to inspire others who want to do the same.
