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“It was the sickest I had ever been,” the Wyncote resident told KYW Newsradio.
On Friday, March 13, Boland was taking her puppy for a walk with her daughter when she felt an overwhelming sense of weakness. A short time later that day, she developed fever, chills, aches and pains, accompanied by a slight cough.
The next day, feeling fairly certain that her symptoms matched those of the coronavirus, Boland contacted her doctor’s weekend service.
"Everyone’s in hazmat gear. You have to pull up to the queue. You have to wait for a phone call from the doctor. They wave you in. You show your license through the window. You can’t even crack the window until they say so. Understandably, they have to have strict rules," she said.
The doctor who tested Boland at the site recommended she call her family doctor to get a prescription for prednisone, which she did. However, it wasn’t effective.
She said it felt like something was squeezing her chest, so she called her doctor again.
“I could not breathe well, I couldn’t speak well, and the doctor said, 'You need to go the ER,'" Boland said. She went to the hospital about a week after initially feeling symptoms. She said the symptoms morph, and by Day 7 the virus was attacking her body harder.
"It’s a very, very insidious virus," she said.
After being admitted to the hospital on March 21, she was given a second coronavirus test. A positive test result came back at 4 a.m. the next day, but she says she was never told which of the two tests the result came from.
By this time, her breathing had worsened and her liver levels were exponentially high. Doctors discussed the possibility of moving her to the ICU and putting her on a ventilator, which she says really frightened her.
After thoughtful discussion between her family and the medical experts, Boland started a course of hydroxychloroquine.
“We decided to try it because I wanted to stay off the ventilator. ... Your odds weren’t terrific — if you’re a coronavirus patient — of getting off the ventilator," she said.
Whether it was because of the drug, or simply her body recovering, Boland's condition improved. After about five days in the hospital, she was released on March 25.
Boland described her hospital stay as a very isolating time. To minimize their potential exposure, doctors and nurses didn’t come into her room very often.
So Boland says she was grateful she had family support, even though she was in isolation for much of it — including FaceTime conversations with her husband and help from her sisters to make sure she was getting what she needed.
“It’s really, really important that you have people around you," she said. "And looking back I feel so lucky that I had people advocating for me — family, my husband. ... I had so many people helping me. I worry about the people who are alone and don’t have advocates." Since returning home on March 25, Boland has been gradually recovering as she nurses pneumonia and her asthma. She’s improving every day and is back to teaching remotely.
“I’m communicating with my students and I’m engaged in what I love doing, and that helps me get well too," she said.
Despite her improvement, Boland has not been officially cleared of COVID-19. Despite asking her doctor’s practice about the matter, she has received no answers about being tested again. She says the follow-up test is not done for average coronavirus cases.
“Still, I would love to have an official test and know that it’s all out of my system. That would make me feel better, but that’s a complicated subject as well,” she said. Boland believes there’s a disconnect between what we see on television and what people are seeing on the front line. To her, politicians might suggest everyone can get tested easily, but that wasn’t the case in her experience, and the same applies to post-coronarivus testing and antibody testing.
She said getting everyone tested is "the only way we can go forward and attack this virus in a thoughtful, specific, concerted way."
In the end, Boland hopes her story sends a message to those who still are not taking the virus seriously.
“I think that you don’t realize how insidious it is until it happens to you, but I am proof," she said. "It was the sickest I’d ever been. It brought me to the point of having to possibly be put on a ventilator."
Boland said COVID-19 brought her to her knees, even though she is young and strong and healthy.