When COVID-19 Hits Home
Helena family shares how illness changed their lives
BY JEANA DURST
The Andersons had recently traveled to
Atlanta in February, and, like all of us at that
time, they were just beginning to process what
was happening with the coronavirus as details of
the pandemic were emerging daily. Two weeks
a sophomore at Helena high school, developed
a slight cough. Amie, her mother, described it as
sporadic and accompanied by a runny nose, just
like seasonal allergies.
They couldn’t have been
prepared or what would happen
next. During this time Sara’s
cough worsened and she had a
10 days were very minor,” says
Amie. With time, however, Sara
developed a sore throat too.
On Friday, March 13, about 9
Sara woke up saying she felt like
she had been hit by a truck. “She’s a national level
weightlifter so for her to say that she’s sore, it’s got
to be bad,” Amie says. When Sara developed a 103
degree fever that would not break with Tylenol, the
family began to suspect the coronavirus.
Getting Sara tested proved to be one of the
biggest challenges of the ordeal. “On a Friday
night, we called the CDC hotline and they told
us they could not assign us to a testing location
and to call her pediatrician,” Amie says. But her
pediatrician wouldn’t see her because they didn’t
have testing, and told them to call a hospital, where
they were asked for an expensive telemedicine fee
Tuesday that they were able to get her tested at the
Grandview Church of the Highlands testing site.
Amie describes the testing site like a scene
from an apocalyptic movie. “You had to hold your
paperwork up to the window and they snapped
a picture of it—they called you on the phone to
ask you questions,” she adds. The medical staff
wore hazmat suits when they shoved a swab up
Sara’s nose through a crack in the window. It took
their worst fears and a positive diagnosis. At that
moment, Sara, realizing she had a disease that
30 Bham Family May 2020
people are dying from, burst into tears.
quarantined the whole family. Amie took the
additional step of notifying the Helena Pandemic
Help Exchange Facebook group of the news so
that any student who had come in contact with
Sara could be put on alert. The response from
the Helena community was incredible: “We had
people dropping food off, prayers, and all sorts
of encouraging messages—including teachers and
some who we didn’t really know,” Amie says.
As Sara battled this disease, the doctors at the
Christ Health Center were with
them every step of the way:
“They checked on us every
single day and made sure that
anything that we needed, we
had.” Not long after that, she
began to recover, but by the
Friday after Sara’s diagnosis,
Amie came down with it too.
especially traumatic because she
has asthma, yet after a very harrowing experience,
she was able to recover as well. “My superhero
feed everybody and bring medication,” Amie says.
(Kevin never contracted it and their youngest
daughter, who is 13, only spent a few days with a
not leaving their house at all, the Andersons were
cleared from lockdown on April 2, and all had
all negative. Still, they are quarantining like everyone
else—albeit with a different perspective. (They have
been advised to assume they can catch the virus
again, just to be on the safe side until further tests
are developed for them to know for sure.)
The whole experience brought them closer
together. In fact, Amie was inspired to enroll in
The University of Montevallo and go back to
college—a goal she says she put off for many
years. “I decided to grab life and run with it …
keeping an eye on the future helps keeps you out
of the darkness of the day and that’s what we tell
our daughters and how we try to live life.”
To read the full extended version of this story,
visit www.bhamfamily.org
/www.bhamfamily.org