Road To Tennessee Part 2

The Other side of COVID

Covid 19 was a world changing event. Even today certain businesses require masks if you have any COVID related symptoms. It was a huge challenge for small business, for children’s socialization, for political unrest, and the list goes on and on. For our family COVID impacted us from multiple fronts, one of which we are now realizing the reality of its effects.

In 2020 I found myself working for Amazon as a delivery driver. My wife had worked hard to start a business a year and a half earlier and COVID set her back to square one. Through the grace of God we were able to get out of our lease and not run ourselves into debt with a store continuing to suffer with the waves of COVID rushing through. This did open up new opportunities. I was able to go to an aircraft dispatching school in St. George and become a licensed dispatcher. All that was left now was waiting for a dispatching job to appear.

As we waited strange circumstances regarding my wife’s health slowly reared their ugly heads. She had our youngest child at the beginning of the year so we had often assumed they were child bearing related, but as winter came on in 2020 things were getting worse. The issues were then given a new excuse, my wife testing positive for COVID 19. Around the same time, at the height of our stress, my wife’s fingers suddenly changed color. The first time I was at work. My wife texted me a picture of her hand and it looked like she’d dipped her fingers into some sort of dye. It was such a strange thing, we weren’t sure if we should be concerned so we hurried to the ER. They were equally perplexed.

When all was said and done, the prognosis? COVID 19, after all it was new and there was no way of knowing what it could or couldn’t be doing to her body. So we went home wondering what other horrible things this new flu could be doing to her.

Here’s where things took a turn. After getting a COVID diagnosis we were quarantined and I was out of work. When the two week quarantine recommendation was up, we called the office to ask how long we should expect to be quarantined so I could get back to work. They said my wife had never tested positive for COVID. That couldn’t be right though because we had received a call two weeks earlier with a positive test from the testing center and my wife had additional symptoms we attributed to COVID. Months later, after an array of additional issues arose, we finally took a COVID antibody test. It came back negative. Suddenly everything we thought was COVID related couldn’t have been because she’d never had COVID.

We would learn later her fingers changing color was called Raynaud’s and, although fairly common, her particular presentation is linked to other major diseases. So yes, because of COVID we lost a business and that sucked but worse than that, we started on a path of misdiagnosis with consequences that would follow us for the next three years.