On the afternoon of our 33rd wedding anniversary ...

Masked-up Steve Baker hiking in the Grand Canyon, in September.

A clean freak, I wash our masks, weekly.

    So how was it, dealing with COVID-19 the first two weeks of January? Not fun, to say the very least. 

    Both Steve and I received the news that our virus tests, taken a few days earlier, were positive. It was Dec. 31, our 33rd wedding anniversary.

     First reactions are a terrible fear, despair, worry and concern. What if Steve ends up in the hospital? What then? 

     Steve, 70, was sicker as well. He started not feeling well on Dec. 30, and was not the least bit surprised to learn he tested positive the next day. 

     About that test: I thought my husband would take off the steering wheel as he sat in the SUV at the former Sears auto service station in NorthPark Mall. He was tremendously affected by the long Q-Tip inserted up the nose. The nurses could not have been nicer but it's quite uncomfortable. 

    "Who knew your nose had such room in it," a friend observed. 

     A fever subsequently impacted the poor guy so he had trouble sleeping at night. A few days into this trial he lost his sense of taste and smell. 

     Meantime, I swore off daily exercise, trying to rehab a bruised foot. I also had a slight cough. 

     That's not to mention crushing worry and concern as well as some fatigue. A breakfast enthusiast, I'm always the first one up, opening the house and having cereal with hot tea and the daily newspaper. On two days that COVID-19 week I could not summon the energy to eat what I had prepared and ended up throwing it out. 

     Steve has a great physician who prescribed that he get an infusion on Jan. 7. This is the type of treatment that top government officials get. The infusion was Bamlanivimab, explained as an "investigational medicine used for the treatment of COVID-19 in non-hospitalized adults ..."

    I drove to the Genesis COVID Infusion Center and was told to pick Steve up two hours later. I ran a quick errand and sped home. 

     On my return, Steve was a no-show. I looked at my phone as long as I could stand it. I got out of the SUV and walked around the parking lot, but there were workers replacing the electrical lines in the Genesis West neighborhood so I returned to the vehicle. 

    It turns out the infusion did not go smoothly at the beginning, and it took the nurses like 45 minutes to sort out how to move forward. They did, and he was finally finished about an hour late. 

     We buzzed home as soon as we could. The next day, Friday, Jan. 8, I started a safe, short work-out. I was able to continue that and now have completed a week of work-outs, pretty much up to speed. 

     On Janurary 15 we went to the Icestravaganza in downtown Davenport with friends. By now we have some antigen protection, but we of course wore masks as well. 

 Stay-at-home observations: 

     1. Daytime during the first two weeks of January in Iowa are overcast and dreary. This is a perfect time to deal with a scary virus. 

     2. It's almost critical to have great friends and neighbors. At the beginning of COVID Week, Debbie and Kevin Jenkins asked if we needed anything because they were going shopping. It turns out we did: Breakfast cereal. Kevin dropped off cereal and the couple also added some herbal tea and Gatorade. It was wonderful. 

     3. Neighbors Mike and Key Pence also offered help. This came a day after I had a strange experience ordering HyVee's Aisles Online. I swear I ordered nine cans of soup but zero arrived. I was surprised but belatedly realized none of the soup had been in the order. Kay did the soup shopping for us. 

     4. We had a terrible time getting a thermometer to work. As soon as we were exposed in late December I ordered a state-of-the-art touch-less thermometer and pulse-ox monitor off Amazon Prime. Neither arrived. At all. 

     Steve's physician at Genesis subsequently sent out a COVID package with a thermometer and pulse-ox monitor. I threw away our original thermometer, several years old. The new thermometer from Genesis never did work (We think the battery was bad.) 

     Exasperated, I scooted into a Walgreens while my husband was at the infusion center; I tried to make it very quick and also had my mask on, of course. Now we have an updated thermometer and monitor. 

     5. The vaccine can't get here fast enough. We in the Quad-Cities live on the Mississippi River; between red state Iowa and blue-state Illinois. Since the whole topic of the pandemic has become politicized, we see it play out in two ways: Illinois has vaccine supplies and now is vaccinating the "1B" level, which includes individuals 65 years old and older. Iowa is still in the "1A" stage, getting vaccine supplies for the healthcare workers and those in senior living centers. It's age cutoff for those who will vaccinated next is 75 years old. It's too bad there are such differences around the country. The pandemic clearly affects all of us.