Life During Lockdown Part 6: It’s Not Just on the News, It’s in Our Homes

Art: Olivia Wang

It’s Not Just on the News, It’s in Our Homes

By ANISA BAHCJA (with artwork by Olivia Wang)

On April 10, my father’s uncle Azi’s world came crashing down. All he had seen on the news to educate himself, all the masks and gloves he wore, all the people he didn’t meet to keep quarantined — it hadn’t been enough. He tested positive for the coronavirus. 

Axhi Azi’s wife (Axhi is “uncle” in Albanian) had been diagnosed with tuberculosis years ago, and once we were put in quarantine, he decided to have her live with her kids, who all worked from home, just in case. Although he thanks God every day he made that decision, he “wishes it didn’t have to be like this.”  

He was 67-years old and alone. He had no one to check up on him, nor would he allow anyone to. He would tell us over the phone, “If this is my fate, then I have been met with it.” He tried to remain positive, but he knew there was a chance he wouldn’t get better. 

Before getting sick, Azi would always watch the news and read the articles put up online. It would scare him to know people around the world were going through such horrors, and he prayed every day that his family would never have to face this. Azi was never a religious man. I asked him about this, to which he responded, “I would’ve never thought in a million years I would sit down by my bedside and pray. I prayed, Anisa. With the smallest bit of faith left in me I prayed, that my family would not end up on the news as the ones I had seen.”

He began to lose his sense of smell and taste a week before he tested positive. At the time, these were underreported symptoms of the virus, and he didn’t have a sore throat, trouble breathing, or a fever, so he continued on without worrying, figuring that he might have accidentally inhaled sawdust at his remodeling job some time before.

He was wrong. Three days later, Axhi Azi had a bad sore throat that “felt just like the sandpaper we use for plywood at work,” he said. Now, his panic set in. He decided that by getting tested soon, he could at least control his symptoms before they got too bad. What he didn’t realize is how fast his symptoms would progress.

Within a week and a half of getting sick, he had trouble breathing. I remember my dad speaking to him on the phone, asking how he was holding up, to which he said, “Never in my 67 years of life do I remember ever being this sick, Adnand, never.” We worried about not only his physical health, but his mental health as well. “How long can someone go, struggling to get better in complete isolation?” we thought. But we hung onto the idea that he would get better. We had no choice.

The next two weeks to come were absolutely horrible for him. He remembers having fevers as high as 104 degrees and trouble getting in a full breath. He told me a story about when he was younger, growing up in a small village in Albania. At the time there were young men who would raid the villages, armed, looking for anything they wanted to take. He remembers going home from school and hearing gunshots near his home and having fear shoot down his legs as he worried if his family was safe. He said, “I hadn’t felt fear like that in a long time. Once I heard myself wheeze for the first time while trying to take a breath, that fear I felt as a boy from gunshots seemed like nothing. That, Anisa, that wheezing got me like nothing else had. I truly thought that was it.”

Art: Olivia Wang

He followed all the recommendations given to him by doctors, friends, family members, strangers, the news, anything he could think of. Advil, vitamin C, water, soup, and a nebulizer became his closests friends within a week. All he could do at that point was take care of himself as well as he could and hope for the best.

On April 23, our prayers were answered. He started to be relieved of his symptoms, got tested again, and the results came back negative. “A weight has been lifted off my shoulders,” he said. He was ecstatic. He gave the whole apartment one last deep clean before having his wife come back home.

All that you hear on the news is not an exaggeration. It may seem unbelievable, like it doesn’t pertain to you, but trust me, don’t allow yourself to be another statistic. No matter how immune you think you are, this virus is stronger and a lot about it is still unknown. Take it from Axhi Azi: “Don’t do what I did. Get tested and take extreme care of yourself, no matter how serious it is or isn’t.”