From her bedroom, Meredith woman issues a warning

MEREDITH — Kaitlyn Haines did everything right.

She had been working from home for a few weeks, staying away from people outside of her family, and had been able to limit her trips outside of her home to a single shopping trip to Hannaford. She even used the self-checkout aisle, and applied hand sanitizer afterward.

Despite all of that, the 31-year-old mother of two found herself in the Lakes Region General Hospital Emergency Department on Saturday, shocked to hear the words coming out of the doctor’s mouth.

“They ran the blood work, did a chest x-ray and an EKG, and because of the x-ray and other tests that came back, he said there’s a 99% chance that we’re looking at COVID,” Haines said in a telephone interview on Monday. She found out on Monday that the nasal swab test came back positive.

“It was scary. I honestly did not expect for it to hit me,” she said. “I was scared, I was angry because I’ve done everything I can to protect myself and my family.”

Haines has gone public with her ordeal, posting about her experience on Facebook and agreeing to talk to a reporter, because she wants people to take the threat of COVID-19 seriously.

Haines has asthma, but is otherwise a healthy young adult. Her husband works for the state Department of Transportation, and until her diagnosis, he had been going into work but limiting his interactions to the same small group of people, all of whom have been asymptomatic.

Her infection is indicative of what the state’s epidemiologist, Dr. Benjamin Chan, has reported in recent press conferences. When the novel coronavirus was first detected in New Hampshire, the infections could be explained by travel to a region associated with an outbreak, or close contact with another person who had recently returned from such a destination. Increasingly, though, people in New Hampshire are becoming infected without a known source, a stage of pandemic termed “community spread.”

The first symptoms for Haines appeared last weekend, she said.

“I started feeling some typical allergy or sinus symptoms, congestions, scratchy throat, and from there I started taking some over-the-counter medications,” she said. A few days later, on Tuesday of last week, she developed a “deep cough,” and since she has asthma, she called her primary care provider, who interviewed her over the phone about her symptoms and prescribed steroids and antibiotics. Her provider didn’t suspect that it was anything other than a garden-variety infection because there was no known exposure for Haines.

Things got worse a couple of days later, on Thursday. Fever, off and on, associated with the feeling of wild temperature fluctuations. She would feel very warm one moment, then the next feel so cold that she couldn’t warm herself back up.

Over the next two days, her cough worsened, and she felt that she couldn’t take a deep breath. On Saturday, when her blood oxygen stats started falling, her husband persuaded her to go to the hospital, where she learned what is infecting her body.

“It was really hard to hear those words from the doctor, because we’ve all heard those statistics,” she said. Even though she’s young and in good health, “I am still not out of the woods, and I could still wind up in respiratory distress.”

She’s also troubled by the lack of information and treatment available. Doctors can’t tell her if she’s going to get worse before she gets better, and they can’t tell her how long until she’ll feel well again. In the meantime, her only therapy is to rest, take Tylenol and antihistamines, and drink hot liquids.

Haines is resting at home now, trying to do her best to protect her young family from what she’s got. It’s hard, she said, because her five-year-old wants to be with her mother. Her eight-year-old knows enough to be worried, and Haines wants to show her that her mother’s going to be fine. But any contact with the children could be detrimental to their health.

“It’s the mom guilt, you want to be there for your kids,” she said. “You also want to protect your kids.”

So she’s isolating herself as much as she can in a small, one-and-a-half bathroom home. She only leaves her bedroom to use the bathroom. Then, she said, “I’m trying to Lysol my way back into my room,” using disinfectant to clean every surface she touched minutes earlier. Just the task of climbing the stairs to her room leaves her so winded she has to sit for a moment to catch her breath.

“I feel really run-down, dizzy, a combination of head cold and pneumonia is the best way that I can put it. I’ve had a lot of illnesses – this is definitely one of the worst.”

Haines said she hopes that, through sharing her story, people will understand why it’s important to follow the directions aimed at slowing the transmission of COVID-19.

“It is here in our area, it is real. There’s not necessarily one group of individuals who is more susceptible than the rest. Everyone needs to take it seriously, stay home, and minimize their own risk,” she said. “This is not just something we’re watching happen in New York City, this is happening right down the street.”