Birth and Healing in a Pandemic Pregnancy, Part 2: Staying COVID Positive
This is Part 2 of a series. If you missed it, read Part 1.
There were some pros to a pandemic pregnancy. I was working remotely. No one saw me from the neck down, so hiding a growing bump was simple. It turned out that everyone started having insomnia at the same time I did as the days started to run together, so we were all equally tired. Comfort clothes were king, which was heaven. I could eat whenever I wanted, mostly ginger ale and crackers for a while, without anyone noticing. And when I thought I was going to faint and vomit in the middle of a long design review, I just turned off my camera, went on mute, and sat on the floor with my head between my knees for 15 minutes until I felt better. Having been pregnant in New York City with my first and feeling consistently nauseous during my 45-minute subway rides to Manhattan from Brooklyn everyday, being fortunate enough to work from home during the pandemic was an unforeseen luxury for my pregnant body. I knew many people who didn’t have a choice to stay home, including both of my parents who lived far away, and I was grateful to feel a little safer with the growing life inside of me.
Like everyone’s kids, my three-year-old was going crazy being cooped up inside with us all day as we tried to work. I often felt like he was a little microcosm of how the world felt. He would sit on the balcony of our condo and introduce himself as people walked past, desperate to talk to anyone other than us. He lamented having to go home after our walks around the neighborhood. Potty-training while working from home was fraught with challenges.
When our preschool eventually re-opened, we jumped at the opportunity to get our son back to school. It was best for him and best for us. We understood the risk, but we all needed the emotional break and development that preschool gave him. He went back to school, and he was back to his funny, blissful, playful self. We found a little sanity back. And then, the fever and the sniffles came.
I couldn’t help but liken this early sickness to the dramatic films like Contagion or books like The Stand. These movies and novels always made those early symptoms seem like a death sentence. The stories coming out of the pandemic were so scary and horrible that we were all terrified of what might be coming next. We did everything we could to keep our family and others safe. We got our son tested and stayed quarantined. Before his test even came back, he was back to his spunky, energetic self, with only 48 hours of feeling lousy. We were sure the test would come back negative, and we could send him back to school on Monday. But on a Friday morning in July, we had a video call with the doctor, and she said, “Would you be surprised if you found out his test was positive?” I replied, “Yes, he’s doing great.” My stomach sank as I listened to the doctor rattle off all the precautions we needed to take to reduce the spread as we were to quarantine for two weeks and notify his school. The test came back positive. I had just started getting the sniffles, and I was terrified for the life of myself and my unborn baby in the wake of this unknown disease. There was little to no information about the effects of the virus on pregnant women. We had no idea what to expect, so we stayed home and waited it out. We called our families as if we were delivering our own death sentences. We got more advice and articles from people who were diving into the dark spaces on the internet than we wanted or needed.
My husband and I got tested at the advice of my OB. Our tests and a second test for our son all came back negative. At that point, we were emotionally exhausted. We were fortunate enough to have sniffles for only a few days before feeling better. We hunkered down at home and waited out our 14 days. Within a few days, we went from feeling doomed to feeling physically fine, but also bewildered and confused by what had happened to us. We were thankful that we were all safe and came out relatively unscathed. The emotional part of the ordeal, however, I will never forget.
Throughout the early to mid-point of my pregnancy, it was hard to stay positive. We tried to find joy and laughter where we could. Between everything we went through with COVID-19, social isolation that was counter all of our personalities, political divisiveness heading into a national election, and pervasive racial injustice that felt like a wound that would never heal, it was hard to see any level of hope. However, bringing a new life into the world does a funny thing to a person. When I walked in the park with my growing belly, I got “hellos” and “waves” in the Bay Area, where people rarely ever spoke to each other. I detected smiles behind the masked faces. I felt like I represented something fresh, something hopeful, for people during a very dark time.
Babies represent the best of us, the untarnished possibility of human potential. And as parents, we want to protect that potential and prepare our children to fly free, be kind, and find happiness from their first breath. In the darkness of night when my pregnancy insomnia brought heavy worries about the world that this little person was entering into, I held onto the fact that my primary concern and focus at this point in my life was to nurture and love this child and my family. If I could do that, we would all be ok, I told myself. As the months passed, I grounded myself in taking care of myself in a way that I hadn’t done for almost a decade. I finally took the advice of a million self-care articles I had read to prioritize my own wellbeing by getting outside, resting, and for once, not trying to overload my heart and my mind with a million problems. My sole focus was to birth this baby.
Continue this story with Part 3, Pivot Before the Final Push
