A UCSF emergency room doctor and assistant professor of emergency medicine says he’s feeling a mix of emotions after being diagnosed with COVID-19, the infection caused by the novel coronavirus that has shut down much of the Bay Area.
Dr. Rosny Daniel, M.D., writes in a post on Medium dated March 15 that he’s feeling “anxious, guilty and thankful.” The anxiety comes from knowing how quickly the virus can spread, which is why he writes he’s been especially attentive to using safety measures while working during the pandemic.
Daniel says he first started feeling sick Thursday evening. His symptoms included a mild cough and “that pre-sick feeling,” which he describes as being slightly light-headed and tired.
On Friday morning, he says he had muscle soreness, a slight cough and felt “slightly feverish.” He was able to get out of his next shift at UCSF and began to self-quarantine.
Saturday, he writes, he received confirmation that he did in fact have COVID-19.
Despite having underlying health conditions, he says of the writing that he “feels fine.”
“I am hopeful that because I am mostly healthy and active, my asthma is in good control and my diabetes is in good control that I will get through this without severe or critical illness,” Daniel wrote.
His guilt, he wrote, comes from the possibility that he might have exposed other people to COVID-19 at a medical conference in New York.
“I was at a conference out of town a few days before getting sick. Of course, I washed my hands like crazy,” he wrote. “But, I didn’t cover my cough, because I never had a cough. I avoided all handshakes and gave people the ‘Wakanda Forever’ salute instead.”
Still, Daniel worries that he either picked up the illness at the conference “or worse, exposed someone else.”
“If the conference had been 2 days later, when we started to get more data about COVID-19 from Italy and more detail of the spread within the US, I wouldn’t have gone,” he wrote.
But Daniel writest he’s thankful that he's young — just 32 years old — has a solid health insurance plan, and was using every safety precaution while working in the ER.
“I hope that we find a way to change our health system and laws so that everyone in our society has access to quality care in a reasonable amount of time,” he wrote. “So that people who work in hourly jobs don’t go bankrupt from illness. So that we all have somewhere safe to live. So that our loved ones will be cared for when they are sick.”
Written by Brian Krans.
