Not "just the flu"

Jack McMorrow
(NYT photo)

I do everything right.

Except while I'm out walking, I stay in the house all day.  When I do walk, I keep six feet away from passing walkers, runners, and bicyclists.  (Except when speeding bikers get too close, but I'm told that they roar past so quickly that my risk is minuscule.)  I don't socialize in person.  I eat a healthful diet.  I exercise daily.  My only underlying risk factor would be blood pressure, which I manage medically extremely well.  I get ample sleep.

I should be safe.  Or so I like to think.

And then I read yesterday's story in the New York Times about 14-year-old Jack McMorrow.  A totally healthy New York kid.  Once his school was shut down on March 18, he hadn't left his folks' Queens apartment, except for one visit with his mother to their apartment house's laundry room.  His parents and his sister have all tested negative for Covid-19

But in mid-April, he developed a rash on his hands and a stomach ache.  Doctors didn't take his symptoms seriously.  He initially tested negative for Covid-19.  By April 25, his temperature was over 104, he had a sore throat and dry cough, he had swollen lymph glands..  He felt as though he had been injected with "straight-up fire."  Another test, this time by a hospital, was now positive.  His heart was soon beating 165 times a minute, and his blood pressure was abnormally low.  He went into cardiac shock.

He could well have died.  Within a day.

By the end of April, doctors were planning to put him on a ventilator.  Before doing so, however, they first tried giving him steroids to combat the inflammation and to suppress his over-active immune defenses.  It worked.  He was very lucky.  Lucky that his doctors kept trying different approaches.  Lucky that they realized he was suffering a new reaction to the virus -- a reaction that has belatedly been affecting young people, young people who at first were considered virtually immune.

Lucky they got it in time.

I would hate to reach the point where only luck -- and educated medical guesses that proved successful -- would save me.

Jack sounds like a great kid.  While still recovering, he wrote his biology teacher a thank you note for giving him the background to understand what was being done to him, while it was being done.  He has a sense of humor about his survival that only an uninhibited kid could have -- home from the hospital after ten days, finally free of all the tubes and wires hooked up to him, Jack danced around the apartment, singing Pinocchio's song:  "I'm a boy!  There are no strings on me!"  He told the interviewer about what it was like in the hospital, "I was very very emotional. ... I'm using the word emotional to cover up the fact I was crying like a baby."

It's a harrowing story with a happy ending.  But it was a horrible and painful experience, one I would have a hard time enduring.  The journalist should be commended for emphasizing how terrible the experience of Covid-19 can be, even for those who survive the virus.  She should also be commended for bringing Jack alive as a real and appealing young man -- not just another patient, another case number.

Jack says that his experience has increased his pre-illness interest in studying medicine.  If he does become a physician, I suspect his experience with Covid-19 will give him a strong sense of empathy for those he treats.

As for me, Jack's story convinces me that I won't be running out to visit restaurants the first day they're allowed to open.  Even though I sorely miss hanging out in my favorite breakfast spot.  It's a mysterious virus, and it pays to be cautious.