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STEUBENVILLE -- After 55 days quarantined in his home because he tested positive for COVID-19, Steve admits feeling a little, well, heady at the thought he might finally be going back to work.
"Steve" isn't his real name. He's chosen to withhold it to prevent backlash from anyone who might not understand the virus and how it is spread as well as those who think it is a political conspiracy and the risks overblown.
A health care professional, Steve's quarantine was extended because even after his symptoms had passed he continued to test positive for the coronavirus. The county health department now lists him as "recovered" after he finally tested negative on May 7, though he can't return to work until he has back-to-back negative tests. He's currently awaiting results from his second test, which was Thursday.
"It's definitely been a long and frustrating road that I never thought I'd go down, but in the big picture I have been very fortunate," he said. "Many haven't recovered."
Steve said his symptoms started in mid-March with a runny nose, then developed into a full-blown cold -- nasal congestion, stuffiness, a mild headache. After that came a worsening headache, body aches, sore throat and fever.
"I felt like I'd just been hit by a truck," he said. "I felt just horrible. I had that feeling you get when you know you're sick, you know something's wrong. I haven't ever felt like that before. I called off work -- I probably hadn't done that in 20 years. I always told people if I couldn't work, I'd probably be going to the ER because I'd have to be pretty sick."
Two months ago there were no local testing sites, so he had to go to Aliquippa, Pa., for his swab. The turnaround time then was eight days, so he returned home and self-quarantined while he awaited his results. He said he took care of himself "as best I could."
"Some of the symptoms I developed were a little strange," he recalls. "I lost all sense of smell and taste, almost like somebody'd flipped a switch and said you can't smell anything anymore. It's not like when you have a cold, I could pass air through my nose but couldn't smell. When I got up to go to the bathroom, maybe 50 foot and back, I would get short of breath -- I consider myself very active, I'm energetic, I work out, I stay healthy, and I still got short of breath.
"I had extreme lower back pain, pain like I've never had before -- I'd wake up in the middle of the night and just pray it would stop because it hurt so bad. There was burning in my mid-chest, constant burning, but when I got up to move it would increase. It was very intense."
He lost his appetite, too, and was so fatigued, he slept 10 or 12 hours a night, then napped during the day, "which I just don't do normally. And I had extreme night sweats. I'd wake up and feel like someone poured water on me, it was that extreme."
On March 25, seven days after his first test, he said it became even harder for him to breathe so he went to the emergency room but wasn't admitted.
"At that time they were still basing a lot of decisions on whether someone was positive or not based on X-rays and my X-ray was normal, but I was still short of breath and burning."
"The next day I got a phone call from the original testing telling me I'd tested positive for COVID-19. At that point I continued to self-quarantine and treated my symptoms as best I could. A week after that, I went for another COVID test to see if I would test negative and I was still positive. So I continued to test weekly and they continued to come back positive. No one could really figure why it was happening -- I went to infectious disease specialists and they couldn't figure out why (after so many days) I was still testing positive. It didn't make a lot of sense."
He still doesn't know how or where he was exposed, "but I can tell you the virus is real," Steve said. "It caused me to have symptoms that I've never had before. It's definitely not a cold, I've had plenty of those and it was nothing like it. I've had the flu; this was worse than the flu. I've been in health care for 25 years and I've never experienced anything like this."
With cold or flu, he points out you might get very sick, then slowly improve.
"But with this virus, it didn't work that way. I got sick and then continued to get worse, day-by-day. The scary part is you don't know when it's going to stop, you don't know if it's going to get worse and if you're going to have to go to the ICU and be on a ventilator. You don't know when you're going to turn the corner, the symptoms and severity progressively increase as time goes on. That's what took me to the ER -- it got to the point where I wasn't getting better, I was getting worse."
Though he lives alone, Steve said he was "fortunate to have people helping me out, bringing groceries and food and leaving it outside for me. And my employer was very helpful and understanding, offering to help any way they could."
"I feel extremely blessed, fortunate, lucky and everything that goes with that," he said.
"I survived it -- there are healthy people who don't make it. I don't know why, but there are healthy 33-year-olds, healthy adolescents even, who are not surviving. The elderly or people who have underlying illnesses such as diabetes or heart disease, their immune systems can't react well enough to fight this off. Those are the people, primarily, who don't survive this. People who are younger and healthier are probably going to survive this, but (you have to worry) if you're going to pass it on to someone who can't. That, in my mind, is the biggest problem - people are transmitting it and don't even know it, and they're transmitting it to people who aren't strong and healthy and who aren't going to survive it."