I managed to do four minutes of walking, one minute of jogging, repeated five times. I went early in the morning, so no one would see me shuffling along. The following Tuesday I tried running again because I was losing my mind being so inactive. On Friday, May 1, I finally got tested for COVID-19, and by then my result was negative. I called the nurse hotline again, described all of my symptoms, and was diagnosed as having COVID-19 over the phone.Īfter that, I started to trend better. On Monday, April 27, the pain was so bad that I laid down on the floor and couldn’t catch my breath at all. I couldn’t finish a 30-minute Zoom call with my grandmother or sleep on my back. What started as weird pressure morphed into a sharp pain and spread to the bottom of my lungs.įrom April 9 to May 1, my lungs hurt every day. But that triggered the scariest symptom: lung pain. After the fever subsided and I finished government-recommended quarantine, I tried running.

It never climbed above 100, but I felt really awful the entire time. I felt a little better the next week, but on Friday, March 27, I got a fever, which came and went over the next eight days. The nurse advised me to stay hydrated, sleep, make myself comfortable, and call back if anything changed. I called a hotline number to speak with a nurse, and I was told I didn’t meet the testing criteria for COVID-19. I didn’t work out at all, and by the end of the week, I couldn’t even get off the couch. By then, my boyfriend and two of our close friends had come down with the same thing.ĬOVID-19? I wrote in my training journal. On March 16, I woke up feeling completely exhausted-similar to when you bump up your mileage and can’t get off the couch. Georgia’s governor didn’t shut down the state for another three weeks. I work in civil rights law, and I worked remotely that week, but since I didn’t feel that sick, I kept running. I didn’t have a fever or a cough, so I thought, this isn’t COVID-19. At that point, the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) was warning that symptoms of the virus included a fever of at least 100 degrees and a cough. That Tuesday, March 10, I woke up with a weird cold.

The Clare Kane Identity by L.M. Severin