Chris
“If I were to go back to March or even February, if I knew then when I know now, I would take a lot of different precautions. in the beginning, I was one of those people. I said, ‘Oh, people are overreacting. It's never going to get me. It's never going to get my family. The percentages are too low.’ It really gave me a kick in the pants. My girlfriend, brother, and my mother all got it.”
BOSTON, MASSACHUSETTS - July 11, 2020: If I were to go back to March or even February, if I knew then when I know now, I would take a lot of different precautions. All these places that were in such a rush to try and reopen look at them now. They are red hot zones. It's just exploding. It's exploding because people didn't take it seriously. And in the beginning, I was one of those people. I said, “Oh, people are overreacting. It's never going to get me. It's never going to get my family. The percentages are too low.” It really gave me a kick in the pants.
I am a sergeant with the code enforcement police for Boston. I interact face to face with people every day. On February 13, 2020, I started coughing. It felt like a cold. Back then, nobody knew what Covid-19 was. I coughed from February to March, even a little into April. By the end of March, Covid-19 started becoming real, and people started getting nervous about it. I called my healthcare and told them that I had been coughing since February. The doctors were not too concerned and said there were a lot of other things going around. While I was driving down Jamaica Way on the 31st, my coughing suddenly took over to the point where I felt like I was going to blackout. I couldn’t catch my breath. I told my bosses that I had to go to the doctor. Wearing a police badge, I knew the moment that I stepped into my healthcare provider’s office that they would test me for Covid-19. I thought that I couldn’t have it because I didn’t have the symptoms like everybody else. In fact, I didn't have any other symptoms at that point. My temperature was normal. But, they said they would test me as I was continuously exposed to the public.
The minute they test you, you get asked to quarantine and knocked out of work for 14 days. I tell you, it was like that virus knew that day that it would become exposed to me. Over the next three or four days, it kicked the shit out of me. The first night, my fever spiked to 102 ℉. Then I had nausea, and I lost my taste and smell. I told my girlfriend, “I’m in trouble”. I lost my appetite completely. I slept and couldn't get out of bed. It was like having the flu, but the aches and pains were incredible. I couldn't even move my body posture. It hurt so much.
On April 2nd, I found out that I tested positive on March 31st.
I ate peanut butter and fluff sandwiches just to give me some kind of energy. I knew it would give me protein. I drank Powerade Zero to get the electrolytes back into my body. People laughed at it. But I knew if I was sick, I was going to need something to balance. I cooked what I would eat. I ate probably three peanut butter and fluff sandwiches a day.
The virus really attacks your body at night. I mean, it comes at you. Every night my fever would spike. The second night my fever was somewhere around 101.4 ℉. The aches and pains in your body were real. It was like you played six hours of football with no pads on.
My girlfriend, brother, and my mother all got it. But, I was never in contact with my brother. My mother was the key for us in the middle. The last time I saw her, I only went over to bring her groceries. Besides a cough, I had nothing. It’s possible I contracted it from her, or she contracted it from me. We don’t really know. My mother didn't get sick until ten days after the last time she'd seen me. It's just the fact that we both ended up with it, but my mother's roommate didn't get it. My daughters hung out with my mother, and they didn't get it at all. Nobody ended up with it from the big, giant dinner party she had a couple of days before she passed away. It's just so random.
My mother had stage four cancer. We were already on borrowed time, but I still feel like she still had more time, and it's always going to weigh on my mind. Had we known more about this stuff beforehand, how would we have acted differently, treated it differently? It's just that so much was left unsaid because I took it for granted that we had more time.
She started symptomizing on April 5th. She couldn't breathe. Her oxygen dropped. She was going to chemo. She never had a chance. It wasn't a long, drawn-out process because my mother was an old-school woman. She had a DNR because she didn't want to live on a respirator.
My brother, who would take her to all her appointments and everything else, started to symptomize. They told him that he didn't have Covid-19. They told him it was pneumonia, so they treated him for pneumonia. It was a Thursday night. He couldn't breathe anymore, so he called an ambulance. His wife was asleep on the couch downstairs. She sees him trotting by, and he says, “Hey, I’ll be home in a little while.” He gets into an ambulance for the county hospital. Within two hours, he gets intubated. He's in cardiac arrest. They have a tube in him. He sat in a coma for 14 days.
Before he was even sick and before my mother was even sick, I made the decision if you can take my blood and help others go for it. If you save one life, it's the most precious thing in the world. My brother needed the plasma, so my girlfriend and I went for a blood test. I tested for A positive blood type, and she tested O negative, which is a universal blood donor. My brother is O positive, so he needed that. They were able to take what he needed and put it back through us.
The last conversation I had with my mom, a nurse, held the phone up to her ear, and I said, “Mom, it's okay to go. Don't hang on. My brother's going to take care of me.” When I told her that the nurse said, my mother opened her eyes and smiled. She passed away three hours after that on April 6th.
After I lost my mother, I didn't think my brother was going to make it. I really didn’t. And he's the toughest guy I know. But, they gave him an 8% chance of living. I decided to go up to New Hampshire to get away from life for a couple of days. As I'm about to hit the road on the Kancamagus Highway, which has no cell service, no nothing. Right at the base of it, before I take the ride, my phone rings, and it’s his nurse asking for me; she says, “Your brother wants you to go get his phone and belongings and bring them to the hospital.” I was only two hours away. I tell ya, I made record time back to Boston. It's such a hot feeling. I go losing my mother, who was my rock in life, to almost losing my brother, who was my other rock in life. It's very, very hard to explain the feeling you have inside of you. He has a chance now. I went up to New Hampshire thinking my brother wasn't going to make it, and I got him back.
It is said you only live once, but I don’t believe in this. I believe that you only die once, and you live every day. I realize how lucky I am. I’ll never stop saying how lucky I was and lucky that I got it early enough that I could help others down this pathway of what can be hell.
I feel so lucky. Though in the beginning, I was at a point in life where I said, why me? Because I'm a proactive person. I'll do whatever I want to do. I’ll fly wherever I want to fly. But now I don't want to say, I WISH I had done this. Or I wish I had done that. I wish I had said this to you, or I would have said that to you. I don't leave anything unsaid anymore. I go out, and I live my best life I can every day. Life is not perfect, and it will never be perfect. Now I have a completely different outlook on life. This wasn't my first near-death experience. But this is really an eye awakening thing for me. I could have lost my mother and my brother in the span of six weeks. Somebody spared my brother. You know, you just want to give back what you got.
Blood Type: A+
Symptoms: cough, diarrhea, fever, aches and pains
Lingering Symptoms: breathing is still off, smell has not completely returned
Chris’ Recommendations:
Listen to your body
Demand that your doctors listen to you.
Don’t stop living your life. But live it cautiously and take care of yourself.
Always help others as much as you can and the world will be a better place.
Chris, 48, is a sergeant with the code enforcement police for Boston.