Seventeen Days

On Day 10, my second Saturday morning in quarantine, I painted sunflowers. My family had gone off to the farmer’s market so there was no echo of their puttering feet outside my door, and I was content to sit in the sunshine, my favorite BBC 6 radio show turned up, and gently layer lemon and saffron and ochre-colored watercolors over and over again.

My phone buzzed with a new email. The results of my Covid test, which I’d taken three days earlier, were available to view. Good. Once I got the negative result, I’d finally be able to leave my quarantine. I put down the yellow-tipped paintbrush and leapt to my computer, quickly logging into the health portal. There were too many buttons to navigate to the correct page, and then I had to download the test results. I clicked the finished download and a PDF popped up.

“The result of your COVID-19 Nasal RT-PCR test that was administered on 11/18/2020 is Positive.”

Oh no.

——

I made the decision to book the trip home while I was on the beach in Kabak in August with Claire, once she told me she’d go back to France for three months. As one of my main emotional supports through this whole strange year, it was jolting to imagine the winter months in Istanbul without her, and taking some of that time to go home myself started to seem like the wise choice. The more I thought about it, the more sense it made. I will renew my residency in early 2021, which could pin me in Turkey whether or not the pandemic wanes, and the idea of not seeing my family at all for a year and a half suddenly made my throat constrict in panic. At that point, November-December was the most logical window for a long trip home; we’d have to accommodate a quarantine, and accept that any change in Turkey’s border policy would send me back to Istanbul, but it was manageable, it was something we could plan.

So we planned, and booked, and as the date of my departure approached I felt more and more anxious. After a year in which I’d only been out of Turkey for 48 hours in February, I was nervous about leaving Istanbul and my apartment and my friends, nervous about being in the US (which I’d taken to half-jokingly calling “The Plague Lands”) during what was shaping up to be a third wave. Nervous about a strict quarantine. Nervous about a 13.5 hour flight. But the days dribbled by, as they have relentlessly all year, and suddenly it was November, and suddenly it was time.

36 hours before my flight, I walked to a private hospital in Kiziltoprak to take a Covid test. I had to pay, but didn’t have to make an appointment; their English-language Whatsapp help line (yes, that’s a thing) told me to walk in whenever, and the results would be ready within 24 hours. I only waited a couple minutes before it was time for my first Covid test of the pandemic, and I felt parts of my nose I’d never experienced before, and then it was done.

The next day the results came back negative, and I let out a deep breath. I could fly. On Wednesday morning, I took a taxi to the airport.

The flight was long and more tedious than usual. I watched Superman. I watched Superman 2. The backs of my ears started to hurt after all those hours of elastic mask loops. I drank the mini bottle of warm chardonnay that I’d bought at duty free. I’ve never been so aware of so many people breathing at once.

I met my dad in front of SFO and climbed into the back seat of his car, which had been sealed off from the driver’s seat with a thick layer of opaque plastic that crackled in the cold wind coming through my open window. It was hard to hear each other through the plastic, so I curled up in the back seat and fell asleep.

Upon arriving at my parents’ house, I went straight into quarantine.

Days have blurred and bent so often this year, with these ones warped further by jetlag and the surreality of quarantine. At first, I was grateful for the slow pace and the quiet time. Usually, I arrive home two days before Thanksgiving and am immediately swept up in family and wine and activity and end up trying not to doze off in the cranberry sauce. This time, I could nap, and relax, and let my body gently adjust to California time. I figured I could get through a week, a week and half, no problem. I could read, I could listen to podcasts, I could paint.

On day 4 in quarantine, a Sunday, I woke up with a terrible headache. Terrible, but not concerning. I figured I needed coffee. Or maybe it was the jetlag. It could also have been the harbinger of sickness, of course. I dragged myself out of bed and made some coffee. A friend in New York texted to see if I was free to talk. “I’m feeling a little slow right now,” I wrote back. “Can I text you later?”

I think I might have gone on a bike ride that day, be-masked, pedaling under a canopy of autumn foliage. Perhaps I went the next day. I remember thinking it would probably make me feel better. It definitely didn’t make me feel worse.

By Monday, Day 5, the headache had mostly dissipated but my throat was sore and I could feel the oncoming post-nasal drip. Still, besides that, I felt fine; after I popped a Sudafed, I felt even better. In the afternoon, I sat in the sunshine on the opposite side of the back deck from my family.

“Are you sure it’s not Covid?”

“No, but I don’t have any fever or cough… it feels like a very mild cold. It could be the jet lag.”

“It could be allergies!”

“Yeah!… but I’ve never had allergies here.”

“Mine developed when I was older!”

“It’s mild enough to be allergies.”

“What do we do if it’s Covid?”

“We deal with it. But I’m sure it’s not Covid. I feel mostly fine.”

On Tuesday, day 6, my throat still hurt and my nose was congested, but again, the Sudafed dried me out for the day and I felt otherwise fine.

On Wednesday, day 7, I had my Covid test scheduled at 11am. The county my parents live in offers a few testing sites, but since I don’t drive, the only one that would work for me was a walk-through site at a public library that Google Maps told me was only a 6-minute bike ride away. I woke up early to chat with some Istanbul friends on Zoom, and then at 10:45, I put on my mask and helmet and cycled off to my Covid test.

A woman in a mask behind a plastic barrier welcomed me.

“What is your patient ID number?”

I told her.

“Is this your first Covid test?”

“No, I had one a week and a half ago.”

“What was the result of the test?”

“Negative.”

“Do you currently have any symptoms?”

A beat. “Uh, I have a sore throat.”

“Okay, just go over there for the test.”

And a few minutes later, I was back on my bike heading home, thrilling at the freedom I felt on the bicycle, thinking about how much easier these sort of appointments are in a language I actually speak.

My sore throat cleared up a couple days later, though my stuffy nose lingered. I still thought it was just a normal cold, or allergies. I still felt mostly fine.

And then I got the results.

—

Contra Costa County suggested I stay in quarantine for 10 days from the onset of my symptoms, but my epidemiologist uncle recommended I quarantine for 10 days from the test, so that’s what we went with. We could easily postpone Thanksgiving to Saturday, since there would be no guests anyway.

I settled in for another week of quarantine.

My experience of isolation stretched 17 days total, more than half of November. It was somehow manageable, even though at first I was dreading an anticipated seven days. (Oh you sweet young thing!) I spent my morning energy working at my computer. In the afternoon, I sat outside in the sunshine at a distance from my family. I went for a half-hour bike ride on our loop every day. After that, I would read. By my count, I read about 2000 pages in quarantine– I finished almost five books. I painted my sunflowers over and over again, with different limitations– one painting used only three colors, one had to be completed in 15 minutes. I listened to endless podcasts, including one days where I binged You’re Wrong About’s five-part series on Princess Diana (that’s about 7.5 hours of audio). I made coffee. I ate clementines. I didn’t feel very productive. Days slipped by. What have I actually done? Time cocooned around me, hemming me into this strange between-space, not my Istanbul life and not quite California life. It’s like the rest of the world was muted, and not much existed beyond the repetitive routine of my quarantine. Congestion lingered in my nose in the strangest way, as though a little Covid monster had parked itself in the pinch of my sinuses. (I did start thinking of it as My Covid, my own personal little pandemic demon who lived in my nose.) Day 11 and Day 14 and Day 5 and Day 9 all mashed together. I painted more sunflowers. I drank more coffee. On Day 15, the congestion vanished. And finally it was Day 16, and then Day 17, and then I was out.

—

It’s tricky to figure out how to write about my brush with Covid, because it was so mild. I didn’t experience any of the symptoms that I’ve been so scared of throughout this pandemic: no fever, no cough, no fatigue, no loss of taste and smell. The symptoms I had (sinus congestion, sore throat) are rare for Covid, but common in general. Every way I felt off was treatable with over-the-counter drugs that we already had at home– Sudafed or Alka-Seltzer or Tylenol. I was more isolated in the seven days leading up to my Covid test than I have been at any point during this entire pandemic, so I didn’t have any stress about accidentally infecting anyone. (My family took tests just to be on the safe side– they were negative.)

I most likely got infected on my flight, probably from someone near me who wasn’t properly wearing their mask. The flight between Istanbul and San Francisco is 13.5 hours, and though I wore my mask for most of that time, inevitably I had to eat or drink during such a long haul. Those few minutes with the mask off were probably enough to get a small dose of the virus. A lot of that, honestly, is just bad luck. Many of my friends have flown and I am the only one I know of who has had the misfortune to get infected.

And yet, I am so grateful. My Covid experience was so, so mild. By the time I got the test result, I was already on the mend. I am also extremely fortunate to have an uncle who is an infectious disease doctor and could be a personalized resource to all of us, and his calm expertise kept me from panicking about the potential course of my infection. On day 13, we exchanged emails about when I was most likely infected. “The good news is that your recovery will likely be quick and complete,” he wrote, “and you will have immunity for at least 6-12 months and perhaps longer.”

That lifts a massive amount of stress off my shoulder, including the stress of taking the flight back to Turkey. It feels like my pandemic experience has turned a corner. There is still so much to worry about, but I don’t have to worry about what my Covid illness could look like. Now I know.

—

I am lucky, but I am not foolish. I realize that writing about a mild Covid experience could lead to someone muttering to themselves, Oh, it’s not so bad. We don’t have to worry.

But imagine if I hadn’t already planned a quarantine? I could have infected my parents, which is my actual worst nightmare. Or imagine if I’d become really sick in the US, where hospitals are overwhelmed and any healthcare is exorbitantly expensive. I have not been as careful in Turkey as I have been in the US. And yet, on November 25, Turkey finally announced the “real” Covid case numbers, and it is solidly in third place for the worst-hit countries in the world. (The US is still, of course, number 1.) I am lucky I got sick when I was already quarantined. I’m lucky my parents have such a comfortable space for me to isolate. I’m lucky I had a test scheduled exactly in the middle of my symptoms. I’m so, so, so lucky. You might not be. I don’t recommend chancing it.

There are vaccines coming inshallah, and the world is going to start to slowly shift and change again. I dream about the bacchanals we will throw, the dancing and the hugs and the joy of closeness. The release. It’s coming.

Until then, I will try to shift my brain out of a strange half-month of liminal living, and re-enter the world again.