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Back when Jessie Fisch started coughing in March, it was still early in Vermont’s Covid-19 crisis. As a health care provider, Fisch knew the symptoms of the virus were poorly defined and highly variable. She had had a cold for a couple of weeks, which didn’t fit what she had heard.
At the health center where she works as a physician assistant, the guidelines were still unclear.
“At that point, we didn’t have enough masks or PPE, and the recommendations were still very mercurial,” said Fisch. “They were changing all the time. At that point, it was ‘You should mask people who are coughing, but don’t need a mask yourself.’”
But Fisch’s sore throat was getting worse. And when she woke up one day with pink eye, Fisch — who puts her age at “almost 70,” knew she had Covid-19. Pink eye is one of many little-known side effects of the virus. A Covid-19 test came back negative, but a short time later, Fisch was in the ICU at Central Vermont Medical Center in Berlin, struggling to breathe.
In the weeks after she was hospitalized April 2, Fisch’s family and her large, tight-knit group of friends kept in close touch with Fisch’s daughter and each other on a large group text, sharing their hope and fear. Fisch has lupus, and her age puts her in the high-risk category anyway. Fisch herself thought she might die.
“It feels like you are drowning,” she said. A month later, she is still on oxygen at home. “You are constantly struggling to breathe and to stay calm. When you can’t breathe, it’s all you think about.”
Two weeks is a long time to spend in the ICU without visitors. Fisch was never intubated, but it was difficult for her to talk on the phone; sometimes she was too exhausted even to text. Mostly, she said, “I was really, really sick, pervasively sick, and trying to breathe and just get through time, which is very hard.”
She compared the feeling in her lungs to having a cheese grater scraping in her air passages.
“I made sure I stayed up during the day so I could sleep at night, which is what I really looked forward to because I was unconscious … it’s very, very long days.”
The kindness and care of some of the hospital staff was very comforting, she said. Less so were the news and TV shows. Fisch doesn’t watch much TV at home.
“I’d channel-surf and then I’d get into these crazy shows that were completely exploiting people, like ‘My 600-Lb. Life,’” she said.
“It’s just a crazy culture; it’s sort of morally deranged. It’s like a peep show,” she said. “The bright spot was Andrew Cuomo and PBS.”
Fisch had four Covid-19 tests, and only one — at the hospital — was positive.
Fisch is now recovering with assistance from a nurse at her Montpelier home. Dozens of friends are bringing her meals. One of her two daughters is staying put in Massachusetts until it is safer to travel; the other has been helping her through the crisis. Looking back on it all, Fisch remembers thinking about John McCain suffering through five years as a prisoner of war in Vietnam.
“It was terrible, terrible circumstances for five years or more, and he had to really just readjust” to accepting his present reality, said Fisch, who when she was in the ICU couldn’t envision regaining her previous independence. Along with being worried about dying, and how that would affect her children, “I was worried about spending the rest of my life an invalid requiring huge amounts of care and ventilation,” she said. “At the time there were definitely reports about pulmonary fibrosis, where your lungs scar. Being a pulmonary cripple was not very appealing.”
Fisch, a sociable person who is well known for the outstanding dinner parties she threw in pre-Covid days, said she’s been told she’s not contagious anymore. Some of the friends who bring meals drop them off on the porch; some come inside.
“Other people feel that they have had it, maybe they didn’t get diagnosed, and they don’t mask and have closer contact with me,” she said. “I totally get people wanting to stay away and wear a mask.”
Fisch often tells her friends they should take the disease very seriously, more seriously than before she found out how painful it was. She welcomes Vermont’s strict rules aimed at suppressing the spread of the virus and praised Vermont Gov. Phil Scott for his decisions.
“On the other hand, life goes on. People have to work; people have to eat; people have lives that make demands on them,” she said. “It’s just very difficult to negotiate a rational course that protects as many people as it can.”
For Fisch, there’s still a long recovery ahead. She doesn’t know how much better she’s going to get. While she can move around with assistance — she brought a box of pastries from Bohemian Bakery up to the ICU staff at Central Vermont Hospital after she was released — she’s always on oxygen. She can’t talk long without coughing.
She’s hoping to get a CAT scan and some pulmonary function tests in June that will help assess the damage. And when she’s able, she plans to return to work via telemedicine.
Right now, she’s just grateful to be here still. She thought there was a good chance she would die.
“I’m glad I didn’t; it would have been really hard on my kids,” she said.
“I was surprised by the incredible outpouring of support and love and matzo ball soup and food trains,” she added. “I think all that energy kept me from dying.”
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