By Eva D. Coleman
Lifestyles and Culture Editor/Photographer
The COVID-19 pandemic has wreaked havoc on millions of households around the globe. Although there are many suggestions to protect against it, some things are unavoidable. “We were going to work, and we were taking all the precautions that you could possibly think of to take; and, in doing the right thing, you know, it just, it happened,” educator Aneesha Jackson, 37, said.
The coronavirus entered her and her husband Orlander’s household like a fast-moving train, yet played out in slow motion. “We went three days or so without even knowing we had contracted it,” she said. “And while he was still moving, we went to go and be seen, and that’s when we found out.” Orlander, 39, is a locomotive engineer, home periodically, and then back on track.
During a brief visit home, he showed signs of what they believed to be a common cold. “It was like a day and a half; he did have a dry cough, and he was like, ‘Aww, it’s just a slight cough, you know, or cold,’” Aneesha said. “He thought it was a cold, something that he normally goes through every year; and so, that’s what he thought. But inside, it was the virus.”
Aneesha says her symptoms started one evening with a headache, followed by fatigue. Later, her 14-year-old daughter came home tired and had a fever. After giving NyQuil that night, she gathered her daughter and remaining children, a 13-year-old daughter and seven-month-old son, and went to get tested the next morning. Working out of town, Orlander is used to receiving playful phone calls from his family. While resting in Arkansas, he received one from Texas that was no laughing matter.
“I was laying down and she called me because she’ll play sometimes, they call themselves playing pranks. She was like, ‘You need to go and get tested. We’re all positive,’” Orlander said. “I said, ‘Stop playing.’ So I kept staying there for a while. She said, ‘Nah, I’m serious.’ Now, the whole time I’m saying this to her, I’m sick. I’m lying there sick. So I was like, ‘Yeah, I better go and get tested.’”
Orlander went to get tested in Arkansas, however, the reality of delayed results caused him to hit the road. Although the drop in oxygen level common with COVID-19 impacted his respiratory function, he pushed through. “I was knocking at death’s door and didn’t even know it,” he said. “So, I put the A/C on high so that I could breathe and I just drove straight to the ER here in Frisco.”
According to the Mayo Clinic, normal pulse oximeter readings that measure blood oxygen levels usually range from 95 to 100 percent, with values under 90 percent considered to be low. Not only did Orlander test positive for COVID-19, his condition was deteriorating fast with a blood oxygen level of 83. He was also diagnosed with Hypoxia and Pneumonia.
“His condition was really bad but he wasn’t sharing that with me,” Aneesha said. “I guess he was just trying to be strong. And so, I don’t even know how he managed to drive five hours, all the way to Texas, and he did.” With a wife and two out of three children having tested positive for COVID-19, even in grave condition, Orlander was determined to get to his family. His doctor stopped that desire in its tracks.
“He said, ‘Mr. Jackson, let me tell you something, I’m going to level with you.’ This is a white doctor,” Orlander said. He added that the doctor frankly said, “‘COVID is worse in Black and brown people than it is in white folks.’ He said, ‘I’m just gonna be honest with you; It’s way worse off in y’all than it is in us.’ He said, ‘If I let you go home tonight, you will not make it through the morning.’” With the doctor’s candidness, Orlander stayed put, allowing the regimen of oxygen, antibiotics, steroids, and IV that started in the emergency room to continue after hospital admission in an effort to save his life.
“I lost smell, taste, motor skills a little bit, peripheral,” Orlander said. “It affected my neurological system. It affected so many things in me because I was worse off than most people.” After a day-and-a-half in the hospital, Orlander was released to go home. So many have not been as lucky. Orlander feels that he now knows when, where, and from whom he contracted COVID-19; and a simple task that could have possibly prevented it.
“Mind you, I’m a locomotive engineer, so we swap trains in Longview, TX, and there was a Caucasian crew that was on the train when I swapped with them,” he said. “I didn’t have my mask on…because when I get on the train, I’m sanitizing, wiping down, I’m doing all that. But I should have just went on and had my mask on before when I was sanitizing, but I didn’t.”
He quickly sensed an issue with being unmasked in what he already felt was unhealthy, recycled air. “So, when I got up there, I’m like, ‘Something’s not right about this air.’ It’s just, the atmosphere wasn’t right with the air and the breathing. I said, ‘Unh uh, something’s not right.’ And shortly after that, I was sick.” Orlander recalled early symptoms, saying “I had like an instant hot-cold and I just started sweating profusely just out of nowhere.
I just started sweating and I didn’t understand what my body was going through.” Yet and still, he tried to rationalize his lack of understanding as being common and brought coronavirus right through his family’s door. Of the Jackson’s three children, the only negative test belonged to their 13-year-old daughter. Another level of weariness was the infection of their seven-month-old son.
“You hear people say, ‘Oh the kids will be fine.’ Or, they’re not affected by this virus and that is not true,” Aneesha said. “They are; and people were actually shocked when I told them, ‘Yes, my seven-month-old tested positive.’ That really hurt me,” Orlander said. “I broke down at that time because, I was like, ‘How could I be so careless to come home in that short period of time that I did, and not only give it to my entire family, but my seven-month-old had it too?’”
As a recent news report about parents losing their five-year-old daughter due to COVID-19 had Aneesha overcome with emotion, she reflected on her family’s experience. “The uncomfortable thing is that my daughters and my husband, we were able to receive medicine. They didn’t give my baby anything,” she said. “I guess they feel that it’ll just go through their system or they won’t totally be affected by it.”
The loss of Lastassija White and Quincy Drone’s daughter Tagan, a kindergartener from Amarillo, TX who died less than 24 hours after being diagnosed with COVID-19, proved that theory wrong. “I just could not handle the pain. I couldn’t even imagine the pain that those parents felt and they were reaching out for help,” Aneesha shared through tears. “So, because I went through and my baby survived, I want other babies to survive as well if they have to experience something like this.”
Although initially there were scary thoughts and doubts, with an added boost, the youngest of the Jackson’s crew of five pulled through. “In my mind, I was thinking, well, ‘All of us, our immune system is strong enough that we should survive it,’” Orlander said. “And I was thinking, ‘Man, seven months old…his immune system is not strong enough.’ Little did I know, he got a strong little immune system.”
Aneesha quickly added, “And because we gave him those Vitamin D drops!” “You need to take this seriously…first of all. This is real. It is not fake,” Aneesha said. “It is a virus that I’ve never experienced or had in my life.” She shared advice to “keep your social groups small, wear your mask…wear your mask. It needs to be over your mouth and your nose. I don’t care what type of mask it is, it is there to protect you and it actually works. Another thing is for African Americans, brown skin individuals: get your Vitamin D levels up.”
Aneesha shared that she learned of the nation’s leading disease expert Dr. Anthony Fauci’s concern regarding the correlation of COVID-19 effects with people of color who often have a deficiency of Vitamin D. She knew of the deficiency risks long before COVID-19 and credits having an African American pediatrician and their foresight in intervention for their seven-month-old’s symptoms that only consisted of mild congestion and a little bit of sneezing.
“She told us to put Vitamin D drops into his formula, and we started that at two months,” Aneesha said. “And so, his Vitamin D level was high; and he was able to get through it like never before.” The Jacksons shared that friends, church members, and neighbors stepped in to assist with groceries and care, leaving items at their doorstep. One neighbor left what Aneesha describes as “just what I needed” in regards to Zarbee’s Mucus and Cough for their infant son, “Because I did not feel comfortable with us taking medication and he had nothing to take.”
Having COVID-19 and being the caregiver to everyone else in the home who was diagnosed weighed heavily on Aneesha. “While I’m healing, I had to make sure that everybody was okay. And so, it was a lot. I don’t want to go through this again. It was definitely a lot but I wanted to share our story because, for African Americans, brown skin ethnicity groups, we have to take this very seriously and know that it is a virus that is causing more critical symptoms and deaths as well,” she said.
With fluid guidelines on the number of days it takes for a person to get “back to normal,” or return to work, there were wide variations between Orlander and Aneesha. “The 14-day thing, that doesn’t work,” Orlander said. “Mine went on about 20 days.” Regarding the reduction of quarantine to 10 days, Aneesha added, “That is not enough. We’re still recovering. Although I’m able to go to work now and everything, we’re still recovering. I got tested three times…I was positive on the 10th. I went back on the 19th [to get tested]; I was still positive.”
After receiving a positive COVID-19 diagnosis and later testing negative, the Jacksons had a major concern of which they feel is shared, yet there is little to no information. “Because we were in our home and it was so many of us that had it, we were like, ‘Okay, how do we get it out of our home?’ There is nothing out there saying, ‘Okay! This is how you get it (out).’” They shared tips of what they did to sanitize their contaminated spaces.
“One of the things that we did was we made sure we washed our sheets every two days; because you’re sweating, you’re sweating the virus out. You have to wash it because again, the virus is highly contagious so we try to get rid of it,” Aneesha said. “Then, when we got to a place where we had a little bit more strength, we lysoled and microband our rooms. Then, we let our windows up for about an hour in our house; and then let our windows back down and Lysoled and microband again. And that’s when we started seeing relief in our environment.”
Orlander added the utilization of an air purifier attached to their home’s heating and air conditioning system. “One thing she left out that most people don’t have in their home that we do, we have a UV light hooked into our central heat and air vac system that cleans the air, kills viruses and all that type of stuff. It’s called a HALO. So that, on top of sanitizing; and I have a handheld UV light as well that kills viruses and stuff like that too,” he said.
Ridding the coronavirus from their bodies and home has not removed the mindset of some who treat the Jacksons as if they’re still contagious. They report people staying away from and acting strange with them at work. “It’s because people are not educated about the virus,” Aneesha said. They continue to stand tall and share their story, having no COVID shame.
“It’s a virus that affected the world, not just our community; it ain’t just Black and brown. It’s touched every ethnicity, everybody, every walk of life. It’s touched us all,” Orlander said. “It didn’t care if you’re rich, poor, it didn’t care. It touched everybody. Politicians, it didn’t care. It’s killing everybody. So for people to be ashamed of…what are you ashamed of? This is a virus that got out into the world and has wreaked havoc upon us. So now we’re trying to bounce back from this. To be honest, why would you be ashamed of something that you didn’t do or cause?”
“For me, It is definitely emotionally draining along with the physical. But, emotionally because when they tell you you have it, first of all, I was in shock,” Aneesha said. “And then for you to tell me that my kids have it; I sat there a good 10 minutes. They had to come back in there and say, ‘Are you ready to go?’ I said ‘Just give me a few more minutes. Just give me a few more minutes because I have to try to figure out what I am going to do with this information.’ Not only that, but stay strong for my kids.”
“Then, on top of that, you have to backtrack and answer all these questions, ‘Who were you around?’ That was a lot,” she added. “Then you have to call anybody that you came in contact with within the last week. It was so hard calling the individuals that I called to tell them. I wasn’t even showing any symptoms, but I had to call them anyway. And, I think that’s why people…they don’t want to have to go through that shame or the heartache of telling others, ‘Hey, you need to go get tested.’ And although it was hurtful and I cried. I was on the phone crying because there are people that are dear to me and I did not want them to feel like I was careless or did not care about them, or to feel that I would put them in harm’s way.”
The calls Aneesha made were met with unexpected responses. “Every person that I called said, ‘I appreciate you. Thank you for doing this and I know it took a lot. You didn’t know, and I know you wouldn’t put me in harm’s way.’ So that meant a lot to me,” she said. “As I called them heartbroken, they encouraged me.” Orlander is grateful for his family and shared that he’s “Ready to just get back to life, get back to working and provide for the family, and just being the father that the kids know me to be.” He spoke glowingly as he glanced at his “superwoman” by his side.
“For me to be as sick as I got and my wife, with her being sick, not only trying to make sure she gets her health together and caring for our son, then our eldest child and then trying to take care of me. I was the sickest out of all of them,” he said. “But for her to just be running around and she’s sick herself, that’s… I can’t even put words on that, but I’m blessed.” While COVID-19 has devastated many families, it’s definitely brought the Jacksons even closer.
“We experienced support and strength in this family. And, with that support and strength, love just permeated throughout this entire house,” Aneesha said. “And, after this experience, all of our views I’m pretty sure are much better and the appreciation, because sometimes, you don’t realize what you have until it’s tested or almost gone. And so, I made up in my mind that I’m not going to be stressed out anymore over anything. I’m going to enjoy my life and enjoy my family.”
