Juneau woman Laura Jim woke up on March 22 feeling sick. She said she had painful sinus headaches, head congestion, body aches, sluggishness and a light fever.
Her initial symptoms didn’t fit COVID-19 testing criteria at the time. Her doctors recommended she take over-the-counter cold medicines. They kept her symptoms in check for about a week.
Eventually, she found out she was Juneau’s 10th confirmed case of COVID-19.
She shared her story with KTOO on Tuesday. We pick it up when she ran out of medicine on her eighth day ill. It was a Sunday.
“The fever spiked up. The highest I clocked it, it was late through the night, was 103.4. The sinus pain in my head was so extreme — it really just hurt to even move my eyes, blink, you know? I honestly cried, like, to myself, like really the whole night night off and on. Every time I tried to move. I was just really miserable. And then, same thing on Monday. … I tried to eat a few times and just really couldn’t. … At this point, I still didn’t know that I had the virus. I just, was like, this is the worst sinus infection I’ve ever had in my entire life and I’m dying.
“So Monday, I had my video doctor’s appointment with my regular doctor, and at that point, the requirements for being tested had been dramatically reduced. … So she said, ‘Yes, I’m going to recommend that you get tested.’ … I went through SEARHC. … You drive up … and they wave you to where they want you to park, and then they have a couple of workers come out in — they weren’t hazmat suits, but they had splash guards and face guards and they were all bundled up really well, gloves, everything. And they come right up to your window. They tell you it’s not going to feel good, and they stick the swab up your nose … till it can’t go back any further. … They gave me some information and sent me on my way.
“By Wednesday, that intenseness in my head and the pain and the pressure was even less. … So I really was like, ‘Yup, I’m getting better.’ And then that’s right when I got the call. … ‘Don’t panic, don’t freak out, but you’re number 10.’
“I cried. … My first reaction was, ‘Oh God, I’m gonna have to tell my kids.’ And you know, they’ve been seeing me going through this intense sickness and, you know, now it kind of makes sense. What really floored me is just how different my symptoms were from everyone else. You know, believe me, even through the whole time I was Google-doctoring myself: What are the symptoms again? Do I have it? And really questioning myself. … So I was devastated. … I felt awful.”
Jim said she worried about her kids, and if she was truly over the worst of her sickness.
“You know, I already felt isolated and lonely as it was, but I felt it even so much more just knowing — you’ve got it. You know, you got the cooties,” she said with a laugh. “You officially have got the cooties. … And I didn’t have a whole lot of time to think about it before the state called me. … And yeah, I was on the phone for almost two hours. … And so they had me tell them where I had been.”
Investigators had her start at three days before she felt sick. She put them in touch with everyone she’d been in contact with.
“You listen to the statistics, and they kind of give an update on, ‘This many of these confirmed cases traveled and this many of this’ — I’m like, one of the two that they have complete question marks on. We don’t know. You know, I haven’t traveled. I don’t know anybody else that was positive or that’s been sick. So, you know, I really have no idea.
“It is not a good feeling being told you’ve got this virus that the world is being shut down for right now. You’re the reason why, you’re sick, you have it. … It’s a very lonely feeling. … And if anybody is going through the testing process that are showing any signs of sickness, I just hope that knowing what to expect — even what the testing is like, what’s going to happen when they tell you? How does the interview process go? What emotions are you going to feel? Sharing that with anybody that might be going through the same thing, it might not be so scary for them.”
By day 15, her symptoms were just about gone. She still had a lingering, annoying cough, but no fever. State health authorities emailed her this letter.
She said she wasn’t retested. It seemed to be based on the timing and her symptoms going away.
“So I feel lucky. … I feel like I’ve got this like, new, ‘Yay!’ on life.”
She did have to give up one of her favorite condiments.
“I don’t know if I lost my entire sense of smell. I did have an altered sense of smell. I’m a Tabasco person. Tabasco usually goes on almost everything. And I had put some Tabasco on some food and it smelled like urine. I have not used Tabasco since, because I don’t want to smell that ever on my food.”
Jim said everyone she’d had close contact with before getting sick was in the clear. But one of her sons just developed a tickle in his throat and a mild fever. She took him for testing on Tuesday and is waiting on results.