A Very Positive—Yet Also COVID-Positive—Birth Story
By: Kelly Mccormick
Tags: Birth, Covid 19, Pandemic, Motherhood, Parenting

Absolutely Positive

By all accounts, I appeared to be healthy and so did my baby, who looked and measured great on my ultrasound that afternoon. I happened to go into natural labor a few hours after I got home from my appointment, and after thirtyish hours of at-home contractions (“crazy” contractions, according to one nurse later on, but that’s a story for another day), my doula — who we hired last minute in an attempt to find some sort of support as first-time parents giving birth in a pandemic and without family nearby — met us at the hospital at about 11:30 pm on May 30th.

After being admitted, I gritted my teeth and blinked back reflexive tears through the infamous early version of the now ubiquitous COVID-19 nasal swab test, which was given as blanket protocol to all delivering mothers-to-be. A nurse inserted a long swab and twirled it around in each nasal cavity for 15 minutes — fine, it was more like 15 seconds, but definitely felt like minutes. It also felt like she inserted it so far back there I wouldn’t have been surprised if it had picked up brain cells.

I don’t know if it actually picked up brain matter. What I do know now is that it picked up the presence of COVID-19 genetic material, and that just after I had received some relief from my “crazy” contractions with an epidural, about one and a half hours after that Q-tip tickled my brain, a nurse burst into my room wide-eyed and shaky-voiced and pronounced, “Um, you just tested positive for COVID-19.”

I was stunned. After all, I had ridden the Peloton almost daily, including the morning before. My lungs felt awesome. My body felt awesome. I felt awesome. (Well, except for the being inside me that would occasionally knee me in my right rib.) I hadn’t left the house in almost three months. When I did, I’d worn a mask and washed my hands and taken every recommended precaution. How could I be positive? Were they absolutely positive that I was absolutely positive?

A note here — I suspect I was positive way back in early March, right around when my company started working from home. I had been traveling a lot for work between January and the first week in March, to Vancouver, New York, Atlanta, and several times to Los Angeles. Just after I returned from my final trip to L.A. I developed an annoying, dry cough that persisted for 5 or 6 weeks but that in no way took me down. Yes, I still Peloton-ed and often PR’ed during those weeks. The nasal swab tests simply for the presence of COVID-19 genetic material. It cannot (yet, as far as I’m aware) decipher between live, infectious genetic material and dead viral particles. And with other viruses, it has been known that people can take weeks, or even months, to fully shed dead particles.

So, it’s possible that I was not actively infected or contagious, though we’ll never know for certain, since there was no time to question, or point in questioning, the test result. The most responsible thing to do was to trust it and act like I was contagious. At our hospital, I would be only the second COVID-positive mother to deliver since the virus first started making its rounds earlier that year. We all had to take the test result seriously, and very seriously make some quick decisions.

The first decision was to immediately dismiss our doula. I felt bad that I had potentially exposed her. There was the possibility that she might not be able to support other pregnant clients who were due to give birth in the coming weeks if she was compromised and/or sick. (Fortunately, she was able to isolate in the days after, and when tested, she tested negative.) For her safety and the safety of other nervous mothers facing birth in a pandemic, dismissing her, was, for us, the only correct choice and an easy one to make. Nevertheless, we had hired her because we felt alone and uninformed about giving birth regardless of doing so in a global pandemic. And now, we felt more alone than ever, with even more challenges to navigate.

That aloneness was compounded when our nursing staff immediately switched to following new, unfamiliar protocol, severely limiting their presence in our room. They changed into full-body PPE and face shields, and would discard their PPE before exiting our room and have to change into a fresh set before re-entering each time. Because of the time that process takes, only one nurse saw us at a time, and they left us alone for four-hour stretches while labor progressed overnight, unless we needed something (in which case we could press a call button). They even implemented a new method to refill our water cups: a nurse outside our door would fill a clean container, and at the doorway pour that water into a “contaminated” container held by the nurse in our room, who would then pour it into our individual drinking cups.