Dad Is in the Hospital With COVID-19

COVID has finally entered my personal world, and it has chosen to attack its most vulnerable, most beloved.

My parents have COVID-19. Mom is doing well, practically sailing through. Dad is in the hospital.

And in the background, starting the day that one of their caretakers called to say she felt sick and was getting a COVID test, is the drumbeat of the insurrection. One minute I am talking to the people who will come out to test my parents, the next minute I learn the Capitol has been breached.

For the next two weeks, I get updates in the form of texts from the caretakers. My parents' pulse ox [oxygen] measurements. 92, 92, 93, 94, 89, 90, and on and on, until Sunday, 83, 86 for my Dad. That is when we finally send him to the hospital. [Update: Shortly after writing this, Mom was rushed to the hospital after experiencing a seizure; she's home now.]

For the past week, my Dad hasn't been able to walk, even with the walker. Not even able to stand. It now takes two caretakers to move him from the family room to the bed — and there are only two caretakers left, and they've been working 12, 16, 18-hour shifts. The other two have COVID.

My brother finds an agency that will send workers into a COVID house and we find out who is desperate enough to take such a job. We are like Murphy Brown and her succession of secretaries. The last one is a woman in her 70s who falls asleep around 9 pm, an hour or two after she gets there.

Then there is no more family room, only the bedroom for Dad.

The star of this period is Diva, who was hired just a few weeks before this all started to be the fourth regular caretaker in the house, signed up for the junior-most shift, working weekends.

Diva's 33, a single mother, impervious to COVID because she had it, with a stamina that verges on a superpower. She's stayed on and on and on, sending an Uber to pick up her two daughters from school to have them do their homework in my parents' den while she soldiers on, cooking and cleaning and changing diapers and putting in requests for new medical equipment, which I dutifully order on Amazon, thank God for Amazon, and taking blood pressures and pulse ox readings and temperature readings and answering our texts and calls.

For two nights, Diva and her daughters sleep together in that same little den — except Diva is getting up hourly to check my parents' vitals.

Calls to and from Dr. Breuer, their internist of the past 25 years. Several times he calls me without even being summoned, just to see what's going on.

Calls to the hospital to get set up monoclonal antibody treatment outpatient, something new.

Calls to my brother Mark, 10 times a day. Less frequently to my sister Ellen.

Fighting this thing, as it colonizes my parents, has become a full-time job. And that is what keeps me sane, the steadiness of the work, the feeling that by working the phones (the way my father, a former journalist, taught me), I can keep him alive.

Until my father suddenly loses the ability to form sentences, can only grunt yes and no. That is when it punches me in the heart. Because while I have been losing my mother piece by piece to Alzheimer's the past eight years, Dad has always been there at the other end of the phone, asking about my family, laughing at my stories.

Last week, he managed a laugh when I told him Trump had been impeached again. Last week, he could form sentences. I could talk to him about when we listened to the Watergate hearings together.

All through this, I've been ransacking my brain for memories of when they both were strong, the Duncan Drive house, wanting — like Emily Webb from "Our Town" — to enter just an ordinary day from that life I so took for granted when we were all well, when Dad jogged, for God's sake, and Mom crisscrossed northern Virginia shopping.

I search my memories like a tongue seeking out a painful tooth.

Now Dad's in the hospital with a full-face breathing mask, his lungs riddled with ground glass opacity, and finally in the COVID ward — despite the fact that he has tested negative for COVID five times.

Still negative, despite the obvious clinical facts.

Last night, I call the nurses station on his hall and ask them to call me with his mobile phone, which has only three numbers listed under favorites — one for each of his three children.

I wanted to soothe him, because I know he's terrified. Who wouldn't be terrified with a mask covering your whole face, with your only contact people in hazmat suits?

The mobile signal isn't good, it seems. I could barely hear the nurse, but I try to talk soothingly. Only afterwards do I realize it's all the PPE the nurse has on and the mask covering Dad's nose and mouth.

I keep my voice steady, I tell him to be brave, that I know he's scared, that we're working hard to help him get better, to get him home. (He's now on a course of Remdesivir and Dexamethasone and today he'll get convalescent plasma.)

I tell him that even if he's alone, we are all thinking about him, all the time. That Ellen is flying down. That we love him.

But his grunts, under the mask, sound more animal than human. He seems to be saying the same thing, but I can't make out what it is.

Occasionally I do understand something. I say I love him and wanting some answer, something, anything — it is so hard to talk into a void — I ask: "Do you love me?"

The answer, though muffled, comes with power: "For sure."

I continue to babble, to keep my voice even, and finally I understand the thing he's been saying over and over.

He's calling for his caretaker Maria who has been with him the longest.

"Maria. Maria. Maria. Maria." Again and again. "Maria. Maria. Maria."

An update since I wrote this: I've spoken on the phone with my dad and told him about all the people who were rooting for him as well as about 100 of my friends who posted their well wishes on my Facebook wall after I put this story there. And he said, "Holy Toledo!" I knew he must be doing better when his nurse said, "Did he used to be a reporter?" I'm elated.

(This article was originally published on Pandemic Diaries. Next Avenue is terribly sorry to report that a few days after we republished it, Debbie's father died from COVID-19. )

Debbie Galant is an artist, writer and diarist. She started Pandemic Diaries to record this bewildering, terrifying and occasionally funny moment in history. Read More