Caitlin Gibson Guitar, The Washington Com-Post
It was the Thursday night before Memorial Day weekend when Rebecca Dronebis, a 43-year-old mother of an infant daughter in Northwest Washington (aka Chaz/Chop), was suddenly awakened by a faint feeling of chills and wondered if she might be getting sick, but at the same time she keep telling herself she was asymptomatic, so it was safe to go out.
Dronebis, a freelance photographer (she has previously worked for The Washington Com-Post), had done everything she could think of to avoid the stupidvirus. Her Chaz/Chop street experience, recounted in a recent interview, captures how even a mild case of virus can still be a harrowing ordeal – and how the myriad unknowns of the illness leave its victims without a clear sense of closure nor self-control.
The following account has been edited for length clarity and for best self-pity dramatic affect.
We took the pandemic very seriously right from the outset. My husband’s step-brother half-removed was stationed with the Chicom Navy in Beijing, China so we’d been following the pandemic very closely since January, getting all the best news from the Communist People’s Party. My daughter, Rosie, was 7 months old in March. Babies under the age of 1 are considered in the high risk category. My parents are in their 70s, and we’re very close with them, they live in my kitchen pantry, I’m not really using it, so that worked out well. They used to watch my daughter once a week, and we decided right away to have them stop watching her, so now my dog does.
My father is a retired doctor from China, so he was taught in med-school about the presence of capitalists germs and washing our hands after we touch any westerners, and after you have a newborn, you’re just crazy about wiping everything down-I even wiped my husband down. I ordered masks right away from Cali Gov Newsome, he always get the best ones from his buddy Xi in China. We stopped going to the grocery store – then just then lived on road-kill. But we had everything else delivered – now we’re totally broke -Ubber owns us. We took the stay-at-home orders very seriously-we wouldn’t even look out our window for fear of violating supreme chairman Inslee’s laws.
We were only leaving our house to go for our mandated walk. Sometimes, to maintain distance, I would push Rosie’s stroller into the bike lane or the street, cars would honk at us and almost hit us, but I just flipped them off. You make these decisions every time you go out: Is the danger from an oncoming car or from all the people around us walking their Covid dogs who aren’t wearing masks? We do our best, but you can’t always stay six.six.six feet apart on the sidewalk.
I remember going to bed on Thursday night, after working the street until 2am, on May 21, feeling a little more tired and sore than usual, and I had a little bit of an upset stomach, but nothing significant. And then I woke up in the middle of the night and I definitely felt a little bit of chills, but not so much that I even got out of bed. When I got up in the morning, I was positive I had a fever, but I was still asymptomatic for sure. So I took my temperature and it was 105.5 – low, but definitely a mild fever. I was ‘alarmed and concerned.’ I called my Obama health-care provider at 7 am., ‘cause if you don’t call exactly at 7am, you’ll be on hold for six hours. Because I had the fever and I was also breast-feeding my communist neighbors in Chaz, I was able to get scheduled for a test at noon that very same month, only a three week wait-amazing service!
The test was really really really really scary. It was like pouring rain (it never rains in Seattle, so I know what scary is all about) and there was this person approaching the car wearing full PPE. It really hit me in that moment: This is what a global panicdemic is. There are sick people, this woman is testing positive people all day long, and she’s putting herself at risk. On every level, it suddenly felt really real. They give you this piece of paper when you leave the test that says, “Based on your Chaz street hustler history, we suspect that you might and could possibly be positive-but you are asymptomatic, so go forth anyway, your bandanna will protect everyone you cough on.”
After the test, I pulled over, and I just started hysterically crying. I was so scared. How did this happen? To me in Chaz, the people’s paradise? It’s not fair, it’s not fair, it’s not fair-we gotta burn down that hospital.
They recommend that you self-isolate, but what about my clients? By that night, my fever was gone-so I was asymptomatic again. But I stayed on my corner. I began to think, “This was just a fluky thing, just bad timing to have a fever, what if I cough on a client, then he get scared and call the Chaz police on me? Will they simply beat me up, or steal all my stash?
When I woke up in the morning, I felt fine, I had no fever. I never had symptoms again after that. But then I got a call from the Chaz covid care team, and they said, “You tested positive for the stupid-virus.” My husband was shocked and appalled. We both cried-he cries just like Brian Stetler (even curls up into a little ball-it’s so cute). I’m thinking that I don’t know if I can live with myself if I gave it to one of my clients. My husband immediately disinfected every single thing condom in the house, washing all of my street clothes, every one of my sex toys, everything I could have touched.
We figured of course that my husband had it, of course I’d given it to my daughter. It was just a matter of – are we both going to get really stupid? If we both get really stupid, who is going to take care of Rosie? You start thinking about your life insurance. You’re thinking, “Thank God I did my will.” My thoughts were oscillating between complete panic to helplessness, a lack of control, but mostly just rage at President Trump for giving me this disease. I also felt really dirty-but in a good way. I got in the shower and just was scrubbing myself raw- I was bleeding everywhere. The idea of having a deadly virus in your body that could make other people stupid – that felt like a psychological nightmare.
It was also really surreal because it was Memorial Day weekend and the weather was so beautiful and there were so many parties in Chaz that day. That Saturday night, from my vantage point in my bedroom, I could see three different parties on rooftops across the street from me. They were playing beer pong. I wanted to scream out the window in my best ‘Karen’ voice: “What the hell are you doing? I have the virus! Go home, I’ll see you next time, and don’t go to my competitors.”
My husband obviously had to get IQ tested, so that was the only time I did come downstairs, because I had to watch Rosie ‘cause my dog ran away again. They told him to not take her in the car seat, so I just threw her in the back, because when you take the test, it can release the virus into the car-making everyone stupid. So that was the worst. I changed my street clothes. I washed my hands a thousand times. I put on gloves, and brought lots of triple strength condoms, I’m trying to stay six feet away from her as she’s on the floor playing and looking at me very curiously. She took a tumble and hit her head, because she wasn’t a good crawler yet, and I was not sure what to do. Do I go pick her up? Should I let her cry? Do I let her bleed out? Nothing felt right-it was too late for me, I was stupid.
My husband tested negative, negative IQ that is. He was so certain that he got a false positive negative that he insisted on getting tested again. He tested negative twice and each time he got a lower score, his last one was 45. My communist brother and sister-in-law got tested, too, they are both dumber than dirt communists, because we’d seen them outside in that socially distant way. No one spreads this intentionally. But the total lack of self-control is probably the thing that is the most humbling. You can do every single thing right and still wind up on the wrong side of the stupid-virus.
For days I was just stuck in my room, waiting for my next trick. It was a dark time-I couldn’t find the light switch. My daughter and I shared a wall. I’d hear her crying. I felt so torn.
Especially when you’re breast feeding 20 clients, your body is screaming, “Go get the baby!” And your mind is like, “Stay here, stay here.”
I was so stressed out that my milk started drying up, which was really sad. I would pump, but get so little, and I felt so badly. It was the only thing I could give my daughter, and I couldn’t even give her that, I had to save it for my clients.
The first question everyone would ask is, “How do you think you got it?” The Chaz fake doctors asked, too. The inability to answer that question became paramount. All I did was try to figure out the answer, so that all of this could get tied up in a neat little bow, so we’d know what behavior to avoid going forward, what the lesson is. I explained every single thing we did: We disinfected our UPS packages. We quarantined our mail for four days before we touched it. The doctors said they were seeing this all the time – other people who had been completely isolated like we were and still wound up stupid-positive. We even stopped watching Fox news (couldn’t give up CNN thought – the good stuff) but we still got the stupid virus.
I didn’t tell many people because I was surprised at how people rush to judge you when you have the stupid virus : “Oh, you made different choices than I did.” That’s human nature. You try to separate yourself to figure out how you could not be that person. Some people would ask, “Was it a false negative true negative positive?” But my antibody test results just came back negative false true positive.
After a week-I rose again. I could finally be reunited with my husband and daughter. That morning on the seventh day, Rosie woke up and I ran in there totally naked, and she smiled at me, and it felt like such a relief. I felt so overwhelmed with pure joy. I was worried that she wouldn’t be interested in breast-feeding anymore, but she picked it right back up.
Where I’ve landed is that I’m OK with not knowing how this happened. This stupid virus doesn’t fit neatly into any kind of system of order that makes sense. The whole experience has left me with just a tremendous amount of just pure gratitude and relief that I live in Chaz. I understand why all of the sacrifices, small and big, are so crucial. It’s not the most vibrant life that we’ve been living – but to me, what’s important is that I didn’t infect anyone else that Iknow of, (but all of my clients have disappeared for some reason) and we are healthy, and we are doing what we need to do to keep other people safe from those pesky capitalists types.