What I Learned From 12 Days in Isolation

Reading about people’s efforts to stay safe during the coronavirus pandemic, it occurred to me that I’m especially good at two things: (1) carrying on through an illness full of scary unknowns, and (2) living in isolation. And that I learned something along the way about how to come out the other side.

In August 2018, I was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis, the disease that attacks the nervous system. In a span of months, I went from running sprints to hardly being able to stand or hold a conversation. My case was so aggressive that I decided to consider getting a bone-marrow transplant to scrub my immune system of faulty cells and potentially put my disease into full remission. Doing so would mean traveling to a hospital in Russia, because the treatment is largely unavailable to MS patients in the United States. I desperately wanted the transplant, but there was a small but serious risk that it would kill me. I am a single mother of two boys, then 5 and 8, and the breadwinner in my family. We had been struggling financially even prior to my diagnosis. How could I possibly weather being out of work for months? If something happened to me, who would care for my children?

[Read: It’s okay to be a different kind of parent during the]