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Fighting Coronavirus Means I Haven't Seen My Kids for a Month
It’s been four weeks since I’ve seen my kids, and I’m starting to miss them.
On March 14, my mother-in-law, a retired United Nations worker who had participated in pandemic drills, saw the writing on the wall and announced that we should send the boys to her in Connecticut.
“I’m not sure,” I said. “They haven’t closed the schools.”
“They will definitely close the schools,” she said over the phone. “And you need to be at the hospital.”
I was still in denial about the impact the coronavirus would have on everyone’s life, even though as a hospital-based doctor, I was already taking care of the first few patients with COVID-19 at the midtown Manhattan hospital where I work.
My husband and I reluctantly agreed to send our two sons away, and the next evening, after the boys were already at their grandmother’s house, on the Ides of March, the New York City public schools were closed.
“We’re lucky,” I told my husband. We didn’t have to scramble for child care. The intensity at both of our jobs was ratcheting up — while my work was at the hospital, my husband’s law practice was seeing a tsunami of new legal work related to the pandemic.
“When do you think we’ll see them again?” he asked.
“Maybe in two weeks?”
The weekend the kids left was a blur — I spent most of it at the hospital. COVID-19 had arrived, but tests were scarce. The New York City Department of Health had a small number of test kits that were meted out to hospitals around the city with stringent guidelines about who should be tested — only people who had been in China or had contacts with those who had tested positive. Patients who were already hospitalized with pneumonias and fevers were not eligible for testing.
Over the weekend, a patient who had recently been discharged after treatment for non-coronavirus-related symptoms returned within 24 hours, febrile and coughing. The ER sent one of the few COVID-19 swabs we still had. When the test returned positive, I felt my stomach lurch. I couldn’t help but think of the classic horror movie trope: “The call is coming from inside the house.”
