The next day I was having chills; the body aches were the worst. I felt the pain come from my chest and go to my back. The act of breathing was horrible. By then I couldn’t get out of bed and I didn’t want to walk. I hardly ate. I drank a lot of tea.

They told me not to take anything but Tylenol. Then the coughing started getting really bad. So I started taking an over-the-counter cough suppressant and then they gave me a Z-Pak.

For a week the symptoms were about the same until my breathing and coughing got even worse. I woke up, I was yellow and decided to go to the E.R. because I couldn’t breath. They put me on oxygen to get my levels back. They did a chest x-ray. I ended up having pneumonia. They did blood work, urine tests, everything like that, just to make sure everything was OK. And they sent me on my way.

A couple of days after I left the hospital and I was not jaundiced anymore. The doctor said my lungs took a beating and that it would take a couple months to heal. I was sick for a total of 48 days. Never, ever have I been sick like that before, it felt like it was literally attacking your body.

She’d get winded getting out of bed. She would stop and rest for 20 minutes simply from sitting up on the edge of her bed. It was about six or seven weeks before from the first cough until she was cleared to go back to work. It definitely wasn’t anywhere nearly as severe as it could have been, but she’s still dealing with the after effects of it today. She gets tired really easily now. She works in retail, she used to do 10 hour shifts, no problem. Now she can’t work more than like five or six hours before she’s asleep on her feet. Just bone tired.

But there is guilt that comes along with that, you look and see all the suffering and you think why not me? Why are some people losing, their fingers, some can’t walk anymore and they have to learn how to redo everything. Like what? What’s the difference between me and them?

I had this sinking feeling. My grandma had part of a lung missing. She had beat lung cancer eleven years ago. Since then she didn’t have any health issues, but I had this feeling like if she comes around it, she’s not going to make it, it’s just given her age, given her medical history. So I came home from work one day. My parents called me and told me that she had pneumonia and was taken to the E.R. and given her symptoms, the treatments and how she was responding, they put her on like a breathing machine. She was on 17 liters of oxygen, which given my medical background, I knew that was just an obscene amount of oxygen.

She wasn’t responding to anything else. So in her wishes, she had asked not to be put on a ventilator and that would have been the next step of treatment for her. So she went back into the nursing home. She was warded off from everybody except my grandpa, because given her dementia, she still had some behaviors and things like that and he was the only one that could work with her really well. The doctor gave her one to two days to live. 

The nursing home changed their bubble policy just so that my dad and his siblings could come see her one last time, which was really thoughtful and really awesome of them. But I couldn’t go see her and I didn’t want to see her with my own illnesses and people that I work with. I didn’t want to purposefully expose myself to it.

So she is a real hoot. She held on for five days. She ripped her catheter out. She was sassy. She was up and moving. It was the weirdest thing, but she was on all this oxygen and fighting to breathe. But it was the most her way of dying that I could have ever seen. She was always real spunky and independent. And she didn’t take crap from people as she did let anyone tell her what to do or how to do it or nothin.

It was really hard. And it was hard not getting to see her, but I think it was for the best in that aspect.

My grandfather stayed after she died. He took it really hard. He already had depression. He was a veteran himself.

She died on May the 4th, Star Wars Day, and out of the blue, his appendix burst, and he had sepsis. And in the middle of July, he died, too. So our family has dealt with a lot of loss pretty quickly. 

My grandparents wishes were to be cremated, not to have any type of service, which worked out well, because we couldn’t have any way given that my grandma died in May.

And that was when there were a lot more state restrictions and orders put in place. But what we ended up doing was just having a big party and reminiscing and having like a potluck type of deal with, you know, family and a few close friends. I still think they would have been mad at us for even doing that. But it was closure that we all needed.