A Different Kind of Freshman Year - Looking Back...

When I last left off, he was packing for college, COPD diagnosis, nebulizer and all... That was fall 2019 and a lot of you reading that can see how his freshman year was not what we anticipated just by reading when he started. He went to a Big Ten University, same one where his parents met, his grandparents (on my side) met and even his great grandfather got his bachelor's degree from....a place known for its atmosphere, especially in fall with its football Saturdays and looking back I can at least say he had that freshman year. And he met a girl....

And then for SuperBowl weekend he had to miss all the festivities surrounding that, apparently he had gotten the flu. Not the stomach flu, but the upper respiratory influenza and living in the dorms we knew that was a risk, but this one hit him hard. He spent the Super Bowl in his dorm room texting his dad not with friends at parties or at his girlfriend's family party. If only that was the worst of it...

February 2020, United States news organizations were really starting to talk a lot about this Corona Virus - what was it? Something in China? Something about beer? No one knew too much about it. By early March of 2020, our son was starting to feel sick again. And again his sick, included an awful bronchial cough that sounded like his ribs would break, can't imagine how much others in the dorms were loving hear that....March 7th he had called in the evening to say he was miserable and just going to take some nighttime cold medicine and go to bed. I never slept great when he was sick, knowing how he was suffering and what it could mean. Around midnight I got the call...He was doing that cough every few seconds as he and his girlfriend were waiting for an Uber to take them to the ER.

We lived about an hour and a half away, but my guess is it did not take more than an hour to get there. The ER told me that they were watching him for sepsis - I was like "no, he is in there for his asthma being complicated from an upper respiratory infection." I told them it was important to keep him calm, that most likely his oxygen level would stay good but his pulse would skyrocket as his body worked hard to stabilize itself. Another time or two they mentioned sepsis - I just kept driving.

When I saw him, he looked and sounded as bad as I thought. They explained their fear of sepsis was due to the high fever and pulse rate that they could not stabilize, but that his oxygen was good. My son had asked about this Corona Virus, they said, "Why have you been to China recently?" and that was as far as they would go with that. He did test positive for Influenza A. He was admitted.

Over the years I had seen him sick, but never like this. They ordered respiratory therapy every four hours. The flu had been raging, fears of Corona Virus were high and hospitals were literally busting at the seams with patients. Sometimes this therapy was late and when it was his limbs would start getting tingly and then he would begin vomiting. I still am not sure what all of that meant, but I know that he was in a worse condition than I have ever seen him in and we were both terrified. We were quarantined to his room and had to mask the few times we were allowed to leave. There was no way to know if he had Corona Virus. By this time there were cases in the US and even in the county we were in. The hospital did not have enough tests to give him one, and they said the protocol for treatment at that time would have been the same as for influenza.

While we were in the hospital the world was slowly shutting down including his campus. After four nights we were free, but we also had to move him out of his dorm room quickly without exposing anyone else to the flu or getting him exposed to anything. He quickly said bye to a couple of people who happened to be there and grabbed what he would need for the next couple of weeks, how long the anticipated shut down was to last. Then we were headed home, but the other half of our family was with my parents to keep our son with Addison's safe from whatever it was we were exposed to. I was started on Tamiflu and we had a prescription for youngest to start at the first sign of symptoms.

And as we all know, the shut down was not two weeks....