Day 8
By: Megan Lloyd Joiner
Tags: Pandemic, Motherhood, Loss Of Taste, Covid 19, Quarantine

A week ago today, I was having an early Saturday morning breakfast with my older daughter when I realized that my coffee tasted funny. More accurately, it didn’t taste like anything. I ran upstairs to wake my husband and desperately squeezed toothpaste on my tongue. It tasted minty. I sighed with relief. I must be stressed, we concluded. The coffee thing must be in my head.

We ordered breakfast out (thank you church Secret Santa). I could taste the eggs and grits, the jam and biscuits, so I was sure I was fine. Second cup of coffee though, tasted more like dirty dish water than anything else. I texted my brother, a neurological ICU doctor in Manhattan. “You need to get a COVID test,” he texted back almost immediately.

I called my hospital’s COVID line and reported symptoms as an employee. They could test me on Monday. I wanted to be tested today. I finally found that the Georgia Department of Public Health was testing folks for free. PCR. Drive-up. I made an appointment at a downtown church, grabbed a mask and left the children with my spouse.

The test was self-administered which was unnerving to me, but whatever. I pushed the swab back as far as I could and swirled as directed. My eyes watered and I sneezed. I took those as good signs. “1–3 days for results,” she said. We would know before Christmas, and I could hopefully have a normal holiday. Every other COVID test I’d taken since returning to work in the cancer center in mid-June after the birth of my second daughter had been negative.

My brother wrote again, though. “I don’t want to scare you,” he said,

“but loss of taste is essentially diagnostic.”

“I’m not scared,” I wrote back. “I just need to know what to do.”

I got home from the test, and my husband had laid out a lunch of left overs.

I donned a mask, took my place at the table next to the baby, and slipped a forkfull of spicy penang curry under the mask to my mouth. I could smell it going in. “I think I’m fine, you guys,” I said to my family.

But as the curry hit my tongue, and my senses leaned forward searching for its taste, I realized that I could feel the spice but I could not taste anything.

I picked up my bowl and went outside. My husband brought me another cup of coffee, and I gulped it, searching for the familiar taste. Nothing. It was like I was drinking hot water.

I called my brother. “Everyone needs to put on masks,” he said. “You’re going to need to isolate away from them.” “But the test,” I protested, “the test isn’t back. We don’t know.”

“We know,” he said, “I’m sorry.”

I called my parents who were (socially-distanced) canvassing for the Senate candidates and told them to go home. I cancelled our tickets for the outside dance performance at the local art center that evening. I called a friend while I sat on the front steps, the weather perfect, the sun warm. I could hear my family in the front yard, obscured by the bushes on the hill in front of our house. They were bagging leaves.

I will admit, I nursed the baby one more time, in our bed, wearing a KN95 mask. I reveled in the feel of her body snuggled next to mine, her mouth on my skin. I touched her hair. I felt guilty and cut the session short, handed her back to her father.

I spent that afternoon and evening in a line at an urgent care clinic downtown trying to get a rapid COVID test. That’s another story.

I returned home about 6:30pm without the test, and packed a suitcase quickly, grabbing anything in easy reach.

I stood across the kitchen from my seven-year-old as she offered me a “virtual hug” and began to cry. She wrapped her arms around her narrow frame and let out a sob. “Go to Daddy,” I said, weeping. And I left them there, her cradled in his arms, her little body wracked with sobs, trying to hold them in, him saying, “It’s alright to cry, sweetheart.”

I went out the back door and paused at the window. I could see them sitting at the table. They didn’t see me. I remember thinking: This is what it looks like without me.

I drove the two miles to my parents’ house and let myself into the carriage house. My mother had made the bed, placed camellias in the bathroom and by the bedside. Something is always blooming here, and she always puts out flowers when guests come to stay.

I don’t remember the rest of the night. Dad brought something to eat, left it on a tray at the doorstep. Texted me that it was there. I must have pumped milk for the baby and fallen asleep at some point. That was Day 1.

Today is Day 8.

Yesterday was Christmas, my baby’s first. I’ll cover that elsewhere.

I started writing today because we have learned a lot in the past week. I want to share it in the hopes that others might learn from our experience and other families might be spared this heartache — or worse.