A Covid positive nurse and her toddler’s long wait to return home

The woman and her son have both been quarantined at a city hospital for 19 days, ever since they tested positive for Covid-19. She worked as a nurse at another hospital, where one of the doctors had tested positive for the virus on April 7.

Among the few words her two-year-old can utter are ‘mumma’ and ‘papa’.

An official from the hospital administration said they still haven’t been able to pinpoint how the doctor tested positive, despite not treating any Covid patients. (ANI file photo. Representative image)

Huddled close on a hospital bed together, the mother springs up and makes a video call to her husband whenever her child says ‘papa’.

“My boy hasn’t learnt how to speak yet, but he understands that the man on the mobile screen is his father,” says the child’s 29-year-old mother.

The woman and her son have both been quarantined at a city hospital for 19 days, ever since they tested positive for Covid-19. She worked as a nurse at another hospital, where one of the doctors had tested positive for the virus on April 7.

At the quarantine centre, for a lot of time when they are awake, the mother is often seen holding her mobile phone in front of her two-year-old so that he can watch cartoons. “He is a very active child. But he hasn’t troubled me at all here despite facing issues with his food and milk,” the woman said.

“Our hospital wasn’t even treating or screening Covid patients, so I don’t know how he (the doctor) got infected. But once he tested positive, all of us who were in contact with him had to undergo tests,” said the woman, who doesn’t want either the hospital she works at, or where she is admitted to be identified. Soon after the tests, she and some other healthcare workers tested positive for the virus.

An official from the hospital administration said they still haven’t been able to pinpoint how the doctor tested positive, despite not treating any Covid patients. They added that two members of the doctor’s family had returned from abroad, but that was several weeks before he was infected.

In any case, this nurse thought that she was safe as neither there were any cases at her hospital,nor had anyone been tested. So, she didn’t feel the need to keep her child away from her while at home.

But that changed and soon enough. After the doctor’s case, she and her son tested Covid positive while her husband’s result came negative.

The two were allotted a hospital room, but the facility is nowhere close to what the nurse would have liked. “My child would get the milk around 11am or so. I can survive till 2 pm with just a packet of biscuits, but I can’t expect my two-year-old to be as tolerant,” she said.

For the last two days, she said, milk has not been arriving. “I am using packed milk that my friends brought us and am heating it up in an electric kettle that I had brought along,” she said.

She, however, fears that the electric kettle may not serve them anymore soon. “Anytime the kettle makes a sound, I worry that it will malfunction,” she said.

The milk that her friends sent, too arrived after a lot of hassles. “The initial few days, the hospital staff wouldn’t let anyone bring anything for us. I am a nurse myself, but the hospital staff would look at me as if I have committed a crime by getting infected. But thankfully they allowed the milk to come in when we needed it the most,” she said.

The mother and son sleep on the same bed. Unlike earlier, she said, she doesn’t feel like watching films on her mobile phone any more. Family members keep calling her through the day and all they want to know is the condition of the child, a thought she said her mind too is constantly occupied with. “Though it worries me that my child fell sick, he is the reason I am able to survive the quarantine,” she said.

The nurse did have a little fever around the time she tested positive, but her son hasn’t displayed any symptoms. “My only prayer is that he remains asymptomatic,” she said.

She said this was valuable time she is getting to spend with her son, though she misses her husband’s presence. “I’ll teach my child to speak a few more words by the time he gets to actually meet his father”.