PORTRAITS of the PANDEMIC

NEARLY SIX MONTHS INTO THE COVID-19 PANDEMIC, MORE THAN HALF a million Texans have been infected. As of mid-August, more than 9,000 had died. Total cases and deaths more than doubled from July to August. For several weeks this summer, hospitalizations broke records daily. ¶ We hear these numbers a lot. For each, there are the people who care for them, hope for them, mourn them. There are people who lost their jobs, who miss their family, who worry about their kids, who don’t know how they’ll make it. These are ordinary people dealing with extraordinary circumstances. These are some of their stories.

Name: Michael Saenz

Age: 35

Profession: Radiologic technologist

Location: Mount Pleasant, Titus County

MICHAEL SAENZ MEASURES THE time he was sick in relation to Mother’s Day and Father’s Day. On May 15, the Friday after Mother’s Day, his cough started. His temperature rose steadily over the next few days. That Tuesday, Saenz, a 35-year-old X-ray technician at a rural hospital in Northeast Texas, tested positive for COVID-19, likely caught from a patient at work. Just over a month later, shortly before Father’s Day, he felt lucky to be alive.

Saenz remembers only parts of the weeks in between. After several days quarantined at home, he began to hear a crackling sound in his chest when he exhaled and went to the emergency room at Titus Regional Medical Center, where he works. “It’ll take your breath away, literally,” he says of COVID-19. Doctors increased his supplemental oxygen fivefold overnight, but Saenz’s condition continued to deteriorate. He remembers being taken out of the hospital on a stretcher, past coworkers cheering him on. He remembers the ambulance pulling over en route to the Tyler hospital where he was being transferred. An EMT from Titus had chased them down to administer plasma treatment, just then ready, on the side of the road. “I’m pretty sure if he didn’t catch us to give me plasma, we wouldn’t be having this conversation,” Saenz says.

The last thing he remembers is talking to his wife from his ICU bed in Tyler. Then he was sedated and placed on a ventilator for more than a week.

Being separated from his family was the hardest part of getting sick, Saenz says. “I kept telling myself that I was going to come back home, that my son needed me.” FaceTiming with family “kept me sane,” he says. “You’re there on your own: no family, no one there, no support.” There were a few moments, he says, when “I did want to just throw in the towel. But I told myself,