The Agonizing Wait for My 4-Year-Old’s Coronavirus Test Results

[Dr@g0n]

With his skinny legs poking out of his cotton shorts, I watched my 4-year-old son walk across the empty street toward our neighborhood park last week.

“That’s close enough,” I yelled as he made his way toward his friend playing in the grass.

“Stop, Wells,” I said, growing more shrill. “You can’t go any closer!” It’s hard enough to get a little child to listen on a normal day, but try persuading him to follow directions after five days on house arrest.

My son froze, a good 20 feet from his friend, and called out to his buddy, “I’m going to stand right here, Barrington, so you don’t get the virus.” I swallowed a biscuit-size lump in my throat.

“Virus.” It’s a weird word to hear your pre-K child say, stranger still when you’re not entirely sure he understands what “coronavirus” means. What feels worse? Wondering if he has it.

My boy’s coughing began on a Thursday night, a phlegmy, body-shaking rattle that struck him every few minutes. I kept him home from school Friday — you remember back when we still had school? — and thanks to a steady diet of O.J. and “Beat Bugs” episodes, he seemed to rally. Coronavirus headlines ticked across my browser windows as I tried to work with a kid at home, but I wasn’t alarmed enough by my own child’s hack to fully freak out until that Saturday.

“Wells is on fire,” my husband said to me after our son woke up from a nap. The thermometer read 103.9. Wells was sweaty and mumbling numbers, which he’d been learning at his Montessori preschool. We packed him in the car and raced to the nearby urgent care. Two hours, a negative nasal flu test and one chest X-ray later, we learned he had pneumonia. On any other March night, that might have been it. We’d be sent home with a prescription for Amoxicillin and orders to get him plenty of fluids and rest. But this wasn’t any March night. This was a sick kid during a pandemic.

                                                           
 

The nurse practitioner came back in after his X-ray and looked at us seriously. “You know, he has the symptoms of Covid-19,” she said. “We just got the tests in. Do you want to test him?”

Did we have a choice?

It seems we did. The nurse practitioner said the decision was up to us because the test would be sent to a private laboratory and we’d have to pay for it. She could only guess how much it might cost, but put it in the ballpark of $200.
My husband and I looked at each other and silently did the math. We could make it work. We know how fortunate we are. We have medical insurance through my husband’s job as a public school teacher. We have an extended family safety net that can catch us in times of trouble. We have enough income to afford a lab bill, especially one that could help protect ourselves and our neighbors. We would do it. But almost as quickly as we agreed to the test, a look of terror took over my son’s now fully alert face.

My husband gripped our son’s 40-pound body, holding his arms down as the doctor shoved a tool the size of a mascara wand up both of his nostrils. It was done in seconds, though Wells’s sobs of “Owie, Daddy. Owie!” made it sound like an hours-long ordeal.

“You’ll have the results in three to four business days,” the nurse practitioner said, advising us to stay at home and keep Wells away from others. Then she put a child-size mask decorated in multi-colored smiley faces on him and ushered us out the door.

Our new reality set in the next morning. The sun was shining, birds were singing, and thanks to two doses of bubble-gum-flavored antibiotics and rotating rounds of ibuprofen and Tylenol, our boy was fever-free and feeling light years better. But when Wells spotted his friends riding their scooters outside our front window, I knew the jig was up.

“OK, you can stand on the porch and wave to your friends if you wear your face mask,” I told my son. Shockingly, he agreed. Maybe self-isolation wasn’t so bad, I thought, pleased with my clever parenting. Then another neighbor boy wheeled up and shouted, “Can Wells come play?”

“He can’t right now,” I started, trying to decide how best to explain social distancing to another child. “Wells isn’t feeling super great and I don’t want you to catch it and not feel good, too. So can Wells just talk to you from up here?” The boy nodded, but seconds later his fruit fly attention span kicked in and he fluttered off to play. It was gut wrenching to watch my son shrug his way back into our home like a defeated Charlie Brown. And worse still when I imagined what his buddy might tell his parents.