I Had a Baby, Then We Got Covid

N. is in her late 30s and lives in the New York City area with her husband and two kids. After having a baby during the pandemic, her entire family came down with Covid. This is her anonymous story.

We waited a long time before deciding to have a second kid. Our oldest was really independent, going to school and living a busy life. We thought we would have the time and space for a second baby. Then the exact opposite happened.

I’m not exaggerating when I say that I don’t remember a lot. I think I emotionally shut down for several months of my life. Definitely in July and August of last year, when the baby was born, and again this March and April, when we got Covid — those times are a big blur. 

I had her in July, so she just turned one. It was after New York began allowing partners into the delivery room again, and after the morgue trucks. Past the time in New York where things were super super terrifying. But it was definitely still full pandemic and vaccines were not a thing yet. 

For a variety of reasons, [I was nervous] going to the hospital. The baby was breech, and she wouldn’t turn over. I had a scheduled C-section and I did the external version procedure where they try to flip her around. It was incredibly painful, almost-as-bad-as-actual-childbirth painful. And it didn’t work. The day after that, I was in a lot of pain, really uncomfortable, and then I started feeling like, different kinds of bad. I called the OB and he said, you know what, I’m at the hospital today so why don’t you just come in and we’ll make sure you aren’t in labor.

It turned out that I was in labor, because that procedure can disrupt things enough to break a membrane or whatever. I got Covid tested when I arrived at the hospital. My husband and I both had to wear masks the whole time. 

We had decided that were not going to see anyone when we got home, and we sent a whole email to all of our parents, like we know this is hard for everyone but we’re not going to invite anybody to come visit and meet the baby because our doctors and pediatrician said we would pose a threat to them coming out of the hospital since they were all 60+. They were like, of course, we respect your wishes. When we got home, I was in rough shape. I was basically useless, in bed, and there was really a limit to what I could do. And my husband was not getting any sleep because he was taking care of our kid, helping to take care of me, and then obviously the baby. On the second night at home, we ended up calling my parents and were like, we take it back, we need you to come. Basically: Risk your life and come help us.

And they did. Everyone’s been making these weird decisions all the way through the pandemic. I guess I’m going to decide it’s ok for my parents to come because we’re really not ok without them here. It felt like...the less bad of two choices. Which is kind of how all parents have been making choices this whole time. What is the less bad or the less terrifying option?

Ever since that decision — this isn’t totally safe, but we have to do it anyway — that’s how we’ve been making a lot of choices. We decided to send our kid back to school after she’d been home for a really long time. Her school reopened, so we sent her back two days a week, and then we all got Covid.

She’d only been back for two weeks in person, and she had been only going two days a week, and then she got sick. She had been there for less than ten days.

She woke up in the middle of the night feeling horrible and came into our room crying, saying she felt so bad. We took her temperature and she had a really high fever. We gave her some Tylenol to help her go back to sleep. In the morning, I took her to brush her teeth, and she put her toothbrush in her mouth and said, “Ew, my toothpaste doesn’t taste right.” I was like, oh no. We pretty much knew then. 

At the pediatrician, they tested her and my husband with rapid tests and she came back positive and he came back negative. He got a PCR test the next day that came back positive. So either it took one day for his symptoms to come in, or the rapid test wasn’t sensitive enough. 

When they came home from the doctor, we were trying all this crazy stuff, like putting her in a mask in her room and giving her an iPad and just...leaving. She was five years old and we were like, here’s your iPad, have fun, see you later? Then we would try to stay out of the room as much as possible to keep distance from her. My husband was taking care of her, because I was taking care of the baby, and we figured if we can maintain some distance, then maybe the baby and I won’t get it.

“Mom, it’s Covid. She’ll be ok. There’s nothing you can do.” I took her to the car, buckled her in, put on my mask, and broke down in theatrical, HEAVING sobs.”

I was sad and anxious, but keeping it together. The next day, the baby got a fever. It could have been that she was exposed before we realized what was going on. I had to go get her tested and my overwhelm hit an 11. It was one of like three times I had even left the house alone (with or without a kid), I had to go to an urgent care center which I assumed would be crawling with Covid, but also enter it knowing that we probably had it and were thus exposing all the other families. The staff were perfectly nice and almost nonchalant. I remember word-for-word hearing, “Mom, it’s Covid. She’ll be ok. There’s nothing you can do.” I took her to the car, buckled her in, put on my mask, and broke down in theatrical, HEAVING sobs.

Then I was the only one who didn’t have it yet. I was trying to keep distant from everyone. The baby wasn’t even sleeping through the night, I was taking care of everyone in the family (including a breastfeeding baby), and waking up every three hours — but also not falling asleep easily/at all because I was in a panic about my own health and breathing whenever I finally had a moment alone to think about it.

After another day or two of the baby getting sick, I started to feel like I had a bad cold. I definitely felt heavy in my chest, like chest tightness, or having a panic attack 24 hours a day. Maybe I was having a panic attack 24 hours a day. It’s hard to parse what symptoms were stress and anxiety and what was actual Covid. It was literally the one-year anniversary of Covid being a pandemic, the day that I got my symptoms. 

The kids were both fine right away. Our five-year-old had one terrible day, one bad day, and one moderate, “I want to watch some extra TV” kinda day. The baby had a fever for one day and then that was it. My husband’s symptoms lasted about a month, and he was in the worst shape. He had a really high fever that didn’t come down for over a week. He was just woozy and dizzy and exhausted.

It was really just hard all the time. We have parents who are super helpful and involved in our lives and they were checking in all the time and wanting to do something. But every single doctor and every corner of Google was like, under no circumstances can somebody come to your house and help you. Like absolutely not. 

The thing with being a parent is that, even if you don’t feel well, you still have to show up and do everything all day. Once I started feeling better it was like, okay, I know I’m not one of the people who is going to get a bad case and I can get up and face the day.

Then, when I started feeling better, I lost my sense of taste and smell. I woke up and took a sip of my coffee and it tasted like dirty water. That was probably a low point for me, even though I was otherwise feeling fine. After all this, I can’t even have a cup of coffee? I think it was two weeks for my sense of taste and smell to come back. 

It definitely took a long time for my husband to feel better. He was so tired, and he’s a very energetic and active person in general. He still gets winded easily and has less stamina, but that could also be that we have been cooped up inside the house for a year and a half. 

I am pretty stressed about the new school year. It was hard for me that sending her back to school was the thing that got her sick and all of us sick. I felt very guilty about it. Like we did this to her. Even though she was pretty much fine after two days and is fine now, I feel like that was avoidable. And so I definitely still think about that going into school in the fall.

At the same time, she has such a great time at school. She loved being there, she loved her teachers, she loved her friends. It was a good thing for her. She had started to be kind of down and difficult at home and we saw a huge attitude change when she went back to school.

Every family has to go through their own set of calculations again about what are we going to say yes to and what are we going to say no to. Any situation you get into, you have that weird conversation with yourself about how safe you feel. Or the worry that you need to do something differently to make it more safe. I am exhausted by that.