The numbers are the terrifying thing: the tally of suspected cases of the virus that seems to grow by the day and even the hour; the ever-spiralling count of confirmations; most of all, the running death total that, as hard as we try, our eyes are drawn to on social media and in the pages of newspapers like this one.
“We see the numbers of people dying from COVID-19,” the voice at the end of the telephone told me Wednesday. “But we don’t see the numbers of us wiping our noses with Kleenex and taking Tylenol, coughing and hacking, while we’re getting better.”
The woman on the phone is 70, a blissfully retired teacher and mother of two, who has found her way back to her birthplace of Halifax.
For the purposes of this column, she chose to call herself COVID-115 to not worry friends and family — but also because when she was diagnosed with the virus last week, she was the 115th confirmed case in Nova Scotia.
She emailed because she wanted to set something straight: that when you are diagnosed with COVID-19 your heart will drop through the floor as her own did. “But I am the face that shows that it is containable,” she said, “that you will be supported, that 811 is your friend, that you don’t have to go through this in isolation.”
In mid-February, she flew to Spain, intending to spend six weeks in a condo overlooking the Mediterranean in the Costa del Sol resort town of Nerja.
“Knowing that I had this massive health team behind me was a massive jolt to my confidence.”
At that time, the town didn’t have a single confirmed case of coronavirus. But a sister back in Canada was watching the numbers soar countrywide. “She told me the virus was spreading exponentially,” my caller said. “That got my attention.”
It took a travel agent’s herculean effort to eventually get her on a flight to Paris, Montreal and finally to Halifax on Saturday, March 21. Going into immediate isolation, she spent the next two days “putzing around in the garden” and waving at neighbours from her doorstep.
But on Tuesday, the hacking cough started. At 6 a.m. that day she called 811. Five hours later she was at a testing facility in Clayton Park. “I’m a patriotic Canadian,” she declared. “I was willing to take a barge pole up my nose for the good of my country.”
The next day a nurse was on the end of the telephone line telling this vibrant woman who bikes, kayaks and hikes that she had tested positive. “She talked me off the ledge,” COVID-115 said of the 811 nurse. “She held my hand emotionally to get me through that first shock.”
Then the nurse mapped out all the supports that would be there as she went into two weeks of at-home isolation: an 811 nurse would call twice a day to monitor temperature and other vital signs.
If there were concerns, the nurse could turn to a medical support team for answers. If the woman's condition worsened — “if I stopped breathing” — an ambulance would be at the front door ready to make the seven-minute drive to the Queen Elizabeth II Health Sciences Centre. “Knowing that I had this massive health team behind me was a massive jolt to my confidence,” she said.
“Don’t panic. The Nova Scotia health system is behind you.”
That was a week ago. Since then her headache — at its worst a nine out of 10 on the pain scale — has disappeared, as have the arthritis-like body aches. Only the “smoker’s cough” remains.
The support, she said, has been overwhelming, from the provincial medical system, but also from family, friends and neighbors. “My fridge looks like something from Pete’s Frootique,” she says of the international cuisine that appears on her doorstep.
The meals, in fact, are a highlight as she enters Week 2 of quarantine. Confined to the house, she tries to “bring the positivity in” by keeping in touch with people on the phone and via email.
There is the restorative yoga, the books and magazines that people send her way, and the view from her split-level home out into the surrounding forest.
To keep up on the pandemic, she watches CBC and reads this newspaper, but steers clear of the screens and those frightening numbers.
“Being positive is so important,” she said. “I’m not going to get into a funk and I’m not going to be one of those numbers.”
When I ask her what her message is to others who will receive a COVID-19 diagnosis, she paused for a second. “Don’t panic,” she said. “The Nova Scotia health system is behind you.”
Then she told me something else about numbers that we can tend to forget in the midst of a pandemic: that they don’t just go up. In time, they go down, too.
