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Dr. Robin Schoenthaler has been a long-time radiation oncologist at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston.
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She and her two sons recently got together for what they hoped was a quick, science-based, “as-safe-as-we-can-make-it” Thanksgiving dinner.
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A couple of days later, one of her sons tested positive for COVID-19.
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“Was it worth all the 4 a.m. wake-ups, the test-result anxiety, the constant texting each other to check on symptoms while living through that first week of absolute uncertainty?” she writes.
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She wants others to learn from her family’s experience and cancel their holiday plans.
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I’m a physician in Boston, and I’ve been obsessed with the coronavirus pandemic since the first stories trickled out of China into my consciousness. Every day I listen to podcasts and medical lectures by a long line of virologists, epidemiologists, and infectious disease doctors. Every week, I write an essay for my friends and family in my area about what we’ve learned about COVID-19 and how to protect ourselves.
My sons – Mackenzie, 24, and Cooper, 21 – live nearby and have been what I call “COVID-conscious” since the start. Both kids work and study from their apartments, have small friend pods, have excellent COVID hygiene, particularly with me and anyone who falls into a high-risk group, and both had stayed mostly bubbled at home the previous two weeks.
Because of this, we agreed to have a science-based “as-safe-as-we-can-make-it” Thanksgiving following all the techniques I had researched.
We kept it small (just the three of us), we kept it short (two hours), and we kept the kitchen-cooking time to a minimum. We ate with the windows and doors open and the fans on, and the boys sat far apart in the dining room while I ate in the adjacent kitchen. We gathered together only once, for a couple of two-second photos, smiling behind our masks and instinctively inhaling.
In fact, we masked except when actively putting food in our mouths, pulling our masks back up into place between servings and when chatting during the meal.
It all went perfectly.
But then, on Saturday morning while I was walking with a friend, Kenzie texted me saying, “Sooooo, I have bad news.” Half a minute later he sent a second text that read, “I feel horrible.”
I knew instantly what it was – he was sick with COVID-19. Which meant he had been contagious on Thanksgiving.
Every parent has their lowest parenting moment. This was mine. I bent over on the walkway and I just could not stand up.
Read more: COVID-19 threatens to create a ‘lockdown generation’ in Europe: Here’s why young people could be the ones paying for yet another crisis
All I could think was, “Why, why, why didn’t we just skip Thanksgiving this year? And now it’s too late to stop whatever tsunami is coming our way.”
The rest of Kenzie’s texts confirmed my fears: He was sick with a fever, body aches, headache. He had lost his sense of smell and taste. He tested positive for COVID later that day.
This is exactly how COVID-19 spreads: A person, like my beloved son, can have it, be contagious, but have no symptoms at all, not a single clue, for several days before getting sick.
This is exactly why we were so meticulously careful about our Thanksgiving. We knew it was possible one of us could be that asymptomatic contagious person. Not likely, not even probable. Kenzie has five friends in his bubble. All had been tested the week before for travel and were negative. All have been tested since and stayed negative, and all were asymptomatic. He had only shopped, carefully, at a couple of large stores.
We had no reason at all to think any of us had COVID-19 that Thanksgiving Day, but we couldn’t be sure. So we followed the science and opened the windows, turned on the fans, sat far from each other, and masked up nearly every moment we didn’t have a fork in our mouths.
But a “small friend pod,” it turns out, is an oxymoron. And “mostly bubbled” isn’t good enough. There are no shortcuts, no bending of the coronavirus rules.
And as it turned out, the precautions we did have in place worked. Cooper and I are COVID-19 negative. And Kenzie had a rough week but is getting better. We’re all getting better.
Read more: After a Boston architecture firm reopened its office, workers came back voluntarily – and every employee said they felt safe. Here’s what worked, and the problems it’s still trying to fix.
But was gathering my little family together for some pumpkin pie worth it?
Was it worth it to have Kenzie feel immense guilt about potentially exposing us? Was it worth the discomfort of having to tell his contacts they needed to be tested and then go into 10 days of quarantine?
Was it worth all the 4 a.m. wake-ups, the test-result anxiety, the constant texting each other to check on symptoms while living through that first week of absolute uncertainty about how things would turn out?
Am I ever going to hold another Thanksgiving in the middle of a pandemic? Absolutely not.
And Christmas in 2020?
No possible way. Not a bit. Not a chance.
Dr. Robin Schoenthaler has been a long-time radiation oncologist at Massachusetts General Hospital. She’s also a writer, story-teller, and an obsessed student of epidemics.
This story originally appeared on Schoenthaler’s Facebook page and on The Boston Globe website. It has been republished with permission.
Read the original article on Business Insider