‘It’s so unknown.’ COVID-19 played out in different ways for these Charlotte residents

Criselda Mendoza woke up the morning of June 11 with a headache. That was odd, she thought. She hadn’t had headaches in years.

She got a COVID-19 test through Novant Health, where she’s a registered medical assistant. The next day, she told the Observer, she heard a “bubbling, or gargling” sound in her chest, and she learned she had tested positive for the virus.

Her symptoms got worse, and on June 15 she went to Novant’s Michael Jordan Family Medical Clinic, which has become a center for COVID-19 testing and respiratory assessment during the pandemic. Mendoza had pneumonia and was sent to the hospital, but she went home three days later.

“I’m not going to lie, it didn’t seem like a big deal because I didn’t feel like I was that sick,” she said. “Even though they had me there under observation, the doc was like, ‘You’re stable.’ ”

But the 30-year-old would be back less than a week later, fearing for her life in a battle with the virus from which it would take weeks to recover.

Mendoza was one of four Charlotte residents who told the Observer about wide-ranging experiences with a virus that had infected at least 4.7 million people in the United States as of Tuesday, according to a New York Times database, and claimed the lives of more than 150,000 Americans.

More than 21,000 people have tested positive for the novel coronavirus in Mecklenburg County, according to state health data. The virus plays out in a myriad of ways, from causing no symptoms at all to life-threatening pneumonia.

The “vast majority” of people with COVID-19 do well, said Karan Shukla, a doctor with Novant Health, but others have more severe reactions.

“I have seen a spectrum of illness, ranging from completely asymptomatic individuals ... to mild forms of illness, ... to very severe forms of disease where their course of illness is ultimately going to result in their death,” said Shukla, who has been working at the Michael Jordan Clinic two or three days a week since April.

A recurring flu

Darrell Mullins came down with a low-grade fever in late March, with body aches, fatigue and a headache, but COVID-19 was the “last thing” he thought he had. Then, three weeks in, he lost his sense of smell.

“And that’s when I started getting concerned,” the 58-year-old Charlottean said.

While on a work call, he spoke to someone who had been diagnosed with the virus. She thought he had it, so he went to his doctor — but he wasn’t able to get an antibody test for more than a month.

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That test came back negative, Mullins said, but his doctor told him there was “no doubt” he had had the virus, given his symptoms.

For the most part, he said it felt like a mild flu, except that his symptoms recurred several times before going away. The virus didn’t affect his lungs, beyond a tightness in his chest one day.

‘The whole gamut of symptoms’

Brittany Brooke also had a mild case of the coronavirus, she said — but it was still the sickest she’s ever been.

She woke up July 8 with a headache, which she put down to a mild hangover from a glass of wine the night before.

“And within an hour it went from a small headache and feeling kind of tired to just like full fatigue, sore throat, the whole gamut of symptoms,” she said.

Brooke went to an Atrium Health urgent care center to be tested. Though her positive result wouldn’t come back for two days, she went home and moved into a guest room, where she spent the next two weeks in isolation even from her husband. She temporarily lost her sense of taste and smell, and she felt nauseous and tired.

Three weeks in, she told the Observer last week, the nausea lingered. She went back to her remote marketing job after a couple days off, but her brain was foggy, and when on work calls she sometimes couldn’t think of a word. Going for a walk left her out of breath.

Brooke said the virus also gave her an elevated heart rate, which came on randomly and felt like a panic attack.

“It’s kind of like, do I need to share with my husband: ‘Hey, I don’t feel well right now. Can we just sit and figure this out in case this is a moment where I need to go to the hospital?’” she said. “Because it’s so unknown, like some people are fine and then the next day they’re dead.”

As of Tuesday, she told the Observer, her symptoms had gone away except for fatigue and a “never ending” headache.

Fear of the unknown

David Samson, a 36-year-old Charlotte resident, said his case of COVID-19 started with a fever, chills and body aches, then turned into what felt like a sinus infection.

He came down with the illness just before the Fourth of July, and, like Mullins, his symptoms went away and came back several times.

“I feel like as much as people have talked about it, there’s still a lot that you don’t know,” Samson said. “So no one could really tell me what was going to come next, and that was the scariest part.”

Ten days in, he began to feel like there was a “heavy weight” on his chest, and he called his doctor to ask if he needed to go to the hospital. He didn’t, and the feeling went away after a few days.

“I’d been trying to avoid going to the hospital, because I feel like, you know, that’s where people go to die when they have COVID,” he said. “And once you’re in there, it feels like you don’t get out.”

Samson’s symptoms let up after two weeks, he said, except for occasional tightness in his chest.

‘Afraid I wasn’t going to make it’

While Samson avoided the hospital, Mendoza, the Novant medical assistant, would end up there twice.

When she got home the first time, she said, “I was like, this doesn’t feel right. I’m struggling. I can barely get up.”

She went back to the hospital, and she learned that her pneumonia had worsened. She was rushed to the intensive care unit. The level of oxygen in her blood was dangerously low, and she was put on a BiPAP machine, which forced air into her lungs.

“I was just afraid I wasn’t going to make it,” she said. “It was just, everything hurt, and trying to control my breathing, and then having that thing on my face just forcing air. I just, I never knew I had claustrophobia until I had that thing covering my mouth and nose.”

But she survived. After two or three days she was taken off the BiPAP machine and given oxygen through her nose. Then she was transferred out of the ICU, to another floor dedicated to COVID-19 patients. She stayed there for a week, still on oxygen, too weak to use a bedside commode without help.

At the beginning of July, after slowly improving, Mendoza went home. Even then, getting out of bed was hard. So was going to the bathroom. Her mother brought her food for the first week and a half, and her mother or husband would help her wash herself when she took a shower.

She was on oxygen until last week, she said, but is recovering.

“I still get a little winded, but that’s even getting better,” she said Tuesday.

Lingering effects

There are the lingering symptoms, the Charlotteans who’ve lived through COVID-19 said: nausea, shortness of breath, a tightness in the chest. There’s a new willingness to speak out about the importance of public health measures, like wearing masks. And then there are the emotional effects.

Both Brooke and Samson said they felt guilty after they learned they were infected, worrying whether they had infected others, even though neither said they did.

“You wonder if you gave it to anybody else. You start thinking about every person that you had come in contact with 48 hours before you started having symptoms,” Samson said.

Then there’s the fear of not knowing how long recovery will take — and if full recovery is even possible. Brooke said groups have sprung up online for coronavirus “long-haulers,” who have had symptoms linger for months.

“There’s the unknown of, ‘In 10 years, am I going to have terrible lungs? Or is this going to come back and manifest itself? Am I going to live 20 years less because I had it when I was 28?’” she said last week.

Samson, who still felt tightness in his chest as of last week — four weeks after coming down with the virus — said it’s scary not knowing what comes next. Yet he also said he felt like having had the disease gave him “armor,” since people who’ve had it have antibodies that may provide immunity to the virus. He’ll still wear a mask, he said, but he hopes the antibodies “stick around and last a long time.”

In addition to her own battle with COVID-19, Mendoza lost her father to the virus recently. In the wake of both experiences with the virus, as she recovers and looks to the future, she described a mix of emotions.

“I feel like I should cherish my children and my husband, and spend more time with my mom, more than I normally did,” she said. “I’m just a little bit more optimistic about life, and a little more cautious.”

This story was originally published August 5, 2020 at 7:49 AM.