‘I’ve never been that sick in my life.’ How a COVID chain reaction hit 3 Paso Robles women
Editor’s note: This is the first story in a series about recovering from coronavirus in San Luis Obispo County. Have you recovered from COVID-19 and want to share your experience? Fill out the form at the end of this story or reach out directly to Tribune reporter Cassandra Garibay at cgaribay@thetribunenews.com.
Paso Robles resident Susan Robinson received a call from the San Luis Obispo Public Health Department on her 74th birthday.
The county wasn’t calling with birthday wishes, but to let Robinson know she had tested positive for COVID-19.
Robinson and her husband, Dave, were among the first dozen or so people to test positive for COVID-19 in San Luis Obispo County on March 19.
The couple unintentionally spurred a chain reaction that led to three additional coronavirus cases. Each person had a range of different symptoms that varied widely in severity.
As of Thursday, 4,092 people have had coronavirus locally — and 94% have recovered.
Robinson said she and her husband consider themselves lucky to be among the county residents who have recovered from the virus.
“I’m 74 years old,” Robinson said, “and I’ve never been that sick in my life.”
Despite her age, Robinson said she’s normally very healthy and active. She didn’t have any pre-existing medical conditions that would put her at an even higher risk for COVID-19.
For the first week or two, she said she didn’t know that the symptoms she was feeling were the result of the novel coronavirus. In a way, she felt that helped her.
“I’m awfully glad I didn’t know then what I know now, otherwise I would’ve been scared to death,” Robinson said.
Paso Robles woman discusses coronavirus diagnosis, recovery
Robinson said she’s not certain how she got exposed to COVID-19. She hadn’t traveled or knowingly come into close contact with people who had.
Her best guess was that she picked it up while attending a conference at Cal Poly where hundreds of people gathered on the last day of February. But she said she can’t be sure.
Robinson began feeling a tickle in her throat on March 2. It would be about a month until she felt back to her normal self.
“I had a scratchy throat, and I’d find myself coughing a nonproductive (dry) cough, sort of like if you had swallowed pepper,” Robinson said.
On March 7, she felt that same tickle, but wasn’t necessarily sick. So, she and her husband had their friends — Heather Mikelonis and her husband Kevin Mikelonis — over for dinner and a guitar session.
It was then that Heather Mikelonis noticed Robinson’s voice sounded off.
“My friend’s voice sounded a little different, and I said something to her. I said, ‘Your throat sounds a little funny,’ ” Mikelonis recalled.
A few days later, Robinson’s symptoms became more severe. On March 16, she was in the emergency room at Twin Cities Community Hospital in Paso Robles.
“I started feeling really exhausted. My cough became more productive,” Robinson recalled. “Then about three days later, I was in bed with total exhaustion and no appetite, coughing and with terrible muscle aches.”
Until five years ago, Robinson was a doctor specializing in obstetrics and gynecology. She happened to have a pulse oximeter in her home that clips onto a finger and measures a person’s blood oxygen level.
After she couldn’t get through a sentence without pausing for breath, Robinson used her oximeter to read her blood oxygen level and got an alarmingly low reading.
“I had the two pulse oximeters on each of my two forefingers and I was looking at them (and thought) ‘I must not be all there. It’s going down to 70,’ ” Robinson said.
By that point, Robinson had a fever of 101 degrees, had begun losing weight due to a lack of appetite and had pain in her upper left abdomen. Her husband was experiencing similar symptoms.
When she arrived at Twin Cities Community Hospital, though, she said her oxygen level had returned to normal.
She said doctors were not quick to respond when she told them how low her oxygen levels had been earlier that day and she felt that they figured she had exaggerated. In a way, she was glad for that.
Had she been put on a ventilator, Robinson fears that the intubation would have had lasting effects on her health.
The doctors tested her for coronavirus, influenza and respiratory syncytial virus, and performed a chest X-ray.
Robinson went home March 16, the same day, feeling as if there was nothing the doctors could do for her that she couldn’t do at home herself.
Three days after getting tested, the county Public Health Department called Robinson on her birthday with the news that she was coronavirus positive.
They told Robinson that her husband needed to be tested right away. The next day, his test results came back positive.
By that point, however, the couple had gone through the worst of it and their symptoms began to ease, Robinson said.
“All my symptoms slowly went away. I gained back my appetite, I stopped coughing, my fever went away, the muscle aches resolved,” Robinson said. “I’m back to 100%.”
On March 22, on the last day of her isolation, Robinson said she felt healthy enough to sign up for the county Medical Reserve Corps once it was safe to do so. The reserve corps is a group of volunteers that were trained to work at the Cal Poly Alternate Care Site in the event of a hospital overflow due to coronavirus.
The two isolated until they were told by the Public Health Department that they were considered recovered.
While it took Robinson about two weeks after receiving her positive test result to get back to normal, she said her husband still experiences discomfort when taking deep breaths six months after their diagnosis. Otherwise, he feels fine, she said.
“It’s amazing. I mean, here we are in our mid-70s. We’re the people that are supposed to be in serious trouble, so I think we dodged a bullet,” Robinson said.
“At my age, I shouldn’t have done that well,” she added.
SLO County resident struggles to get COVID-19 testing
When Robinson received the news that she tested positive for COVID-19 on March 19, she called her friend Heather Mikelonis right away.
Mikelonis said she and her husband had heard the Robinsons were ill, but the Mikelonises personally felt fine.
“This was before the shutdown. ... Things were a little more status quo,” Heather Mikelonis said.
On March 11, the Mikelonises of Paso Robles went to dinner with a group and sat next to their friend Anne Crabbe — the same day Kevin Milekonis began feeling light body aches. Crabbe later tested positive for COVID-19.
Two days after the dinner, Heather Mikelonis felt tightness in her chest. By Saturday night, she said she began feeling “really tired and feverish” but didn’t actually have a fever.
Mikelonis had already planned to take the following week off work to help with the San Luis Obispo International Film Festival — which was ultimately canceled due to COVID-19 — so she remained at home.
She said when Robinson told her that she had gone to the ER, she “knew what was going on.”
“(I) started to figure this is probably COVID-19, but there wasn’t access to testing at that point unless you were really, really sick,” Mikelonis said.
Even once Robinson tested positive, Mikelonis and her husband were denied COVID-19 tests because of their light symptoms. They were, however, given a quarantine order.
“We let (the Public Health Department) know that we weren’t feeling well; we would like a test,” Mikelonis said. “They said, ‘Well, you don’t qualify with your symptoms but assume you have it and stay home. Seek medical help if things get worse.’ ”
When the coronavirus first appeared in San Luis Obispo County, testing availability was limited to people experiencing a cough, shortness of breath and a fever. Testing resources have fluctuated but improved significantly as the pandemic has continued.
Mikelonis said that the health department checked on her and her husband regularly throughout their quarantine, and once her husband developed a cough, they were told to get tested. Both of their coronavirus test results returned positive March 23.
The COVID-19 case count in the county as of March 23 was in the 30s, according to ReadySLO.org.
“One of my thoughts was, ‘We don’t really know what this means,’ ”Mikelonis said.
By the time they received their results, the Paso Robles couple was on the mend and only had two days left of their quarantine.
Looking back on her correspondence with family and friends at the time, Mikelonis said she realizes she was more ill than she remembers now.
“I look back at some of the texts and when I reread them, I was like ‘Oh, I don’t remember it,’ ” Mikelonis said. “You know, the further away you get from being sick, the easier it is to say it wasn’t that bad.”
Mikelonis said she experienced tightness in her chest, chills, sweats, body aches, increased temperature, extreme fatigue and an occasional cough for about two to three days.
Longer-lasting symptoms included fatigue and a headache.
Even though now she is back to work and feels fully recovered most of the time, Mikelonis said she still experiences intermittent pain in her lungs. She and her doctor were still “working to identify” why that is, she said.
Mikelonis, who is under the age of 50, said she doesn’t have pre-existing health conditions.
Another lingering symptom that has since gone away was her loss of taste and smell.
The Paso Robles woman said she began to be able to smell things in front of her shortly after being released from quarantine, so she assumed her sense of smell had returned to its full functionality.
It wasn’t until a while later that she realized she had been wrong.
“I was cooking and I walked out to throw something away and I came back in the house and I could smell (the food cooking),” Mikelonis said laughing. “I was like ‘Oh my gosh, I can smell this, I can smell the garlic. I missed this, but I didn’t know I missed this.’ ”
Mikelonis said once she was recovered, she donated plasma four or five times through Vitalant in hopes of helping others recover more quickly.
Both Mikelonis and Robinson said they spoke up about their experience with COVID-19 to eliminate stigma and uncover some of the mystery that shrouds the virus.
North County coronavirus patient had no cough or fever
Less than a week after she ate dinner with Mikelonis on March 11, Crabbe began to feel achy. But she was denied coronavirus tests through the county until Mikelonis tested positive on March 23.
Crabbe said she had taken her two daughters down from Paso Robles to Pismo Beach for the weekend to celebrate a birthday the day after many local school districts closed.
“I was fine the day before,” Crabbe said.
When she woke up Sunday, March 15, Crabbe felt as if she was coming down with the flu. So, she and her daughters packed up and headed home.
“It was just a rundown feeling,” Crabbe said. “I just felt really tired and my throat hurt and I was just fatigued. I didn’t have a temperature.”
Crabbe said when she told a friend, her friend assured her that it was likely just the flu.
As of March 15, only one coronavirus case had been confirmed in San Luis Obispo County and no dinner guests other than the Mikelonises had experienced COVID-19 symptoms.
However, when Crabbe didn’t feel any better the next day, she had her daughters go stay with their father and attempted to get tested for COVID-19. But, like Mikelonis, she was denied a test by the county because her symptoms didn’t meet the criteria.
“I never had a fever, I never had respiratory issues, and my symptoms were really just aches and pains like nobody’s business,” Crabbe said.
“I felt like I had been thrown down a mountain, and then I lost my sense of smell and I guess I lost my sense of taste,” she added.
Crabbe said the aches and pains kept her from sleeping well and lasted 12 days, though she said, “It felt like I was sick for two months. It felt like forever.”
“It was scary being like, another day dawning and I’m still sick,” Crabbe said.
She said she began feeling better once she started eating regularly, despite having no sense of appetite and a bad taste in her mouth.
When Mikelonis tested positive for COVID-19 on March 23, Crabbe received a call from the county saying she could now be tested for the virus.
She was tested for coronavirus on March 25 and received a positive result the same day. By that time, there were only 46 COVID-19 cases in San Luis Obispo County, according to ReadySLO.org.
Her children and her ex-husband were given a quarantine order. She said one of her daughters felt sick for about a day and a half, but nothing more.
Crabbe said the day after she received her positive test result, 11 days into feeling ill, the bad taste in her mouth went away. Slowly, but surely, so did the aches.
“I got really scared. I had something that’s killing people all over the world,” Crabbe said. “Then miraculously, I didn’t have that bad taste in my mouth anymore (and thought) ‘I’m going to be OK.’”
The virus, however, nagged her for several more weeks. Crabbe said after her isolation was up and she was technically in the clear, she got tested for coronavirus again in order to donate plasma.
Her test result in early April came back positive, but she didn’t hear from the Public Health Department like she had the first time.
So, she took precautions and was tested again in late April, finally testing negative.
Since recovering from coronavirus, Crabbe, who is in her 50s and had no prior health conditions, said she hasn’t had any residual symptoms.
“I still act as if I can catch COVID,” Crabbe said. “Even though it’s possible to some extent that I might not catch it, I have to act like I could, I still have to follow all the rules, follow all the scientific advice and for nothing else. I have to model this for my children.”
This story was originally published October 23, 2020 at 11:34 AM.
