(*Name changed to protect privacy.)

Marie*, who works as an emergency room tech at a hospital in Henderson, was immersed daily in the grueling fight against COVID-19. She watched as people came into the emergency room, reporting flu-like symptoms and running temperatures. As an ER tech, Marie’s job was to assist nurses. She took vitals, started IV lines, and helped COVID patients, who were often weak, use the bathroom. As a front-line health care worker, she knew the risk of exposure was high. That was always on her mind as she went about her days.

Marie began feeling unwell on May 22. Her main symptom was fatigue, which she initially attributed to long hours at work. “At first I thought it was the flu, and I [took] DayQuil and NyQuil. What made me realize that it was COVID was [when] I lost my taste and sense of smell. Because I work in the hospital, I know that patients complain about that,” Marie says.

She got tested and found out the following day that she was positive. She began isolating at home, but two days later, her husband also became sick and tested positive. The couple have a 5-year-old son who was tested as well. “They said he was not positive, but they were gonna treat him as if he was positive, because he was spending so much time with us and we were sick,” Marie says.

The family isolated at home for the next two weeks, continuing to care for their son, but carefully, to lessen his exposure. Marie checked in with a home nurse daily, taking her own vitals and reporting her assessment. “Throughout my COVID period, I only had a fever twice. The [highest] it got was 103 degrees. Another thing I noticed was I had a pulse of 86, but I wasn’t having shortness of breath, [though] my oxygen level was very low. I was weak all that time [and] very, very lethargic.”

Other symptoms that both Marie and her husband experienced included joint pains, nausea, vomiting and headaches so excruciating that her husband said it felt like his eyes were going to burst from the pressure. Both treated their pains with round-the-clock Tylenol, administered every six hours.

Marie’s isolation period ended on June 6, but she waited two or three days before considering going back to work. At that point, she was showing no symptoms and felt better. When she got retested, however, it came back positive again, and she was told to quarantine for 10 additional days before returning to work.

It has now been a little more than a month since Marie and her husband have been cleared, and she says they have no lingering effects from COVID-19. At the hospital, she has seen patients who haven’t fared as well, and she knows how fortunate her family is.

“I’m not gonna lie, when they told me that I was positive, I was kind of scared, because I didn’t know what was gonna happen. I didn’t know if it was gonna get even worse,” she says. “But as the days passed, I was OK.”