Firefighter Fights 2 Months Of Covid

After her husband came home from transporting a patient to the hospital, Kim Talmadge didn’t realize that that call — unlike so many others that she and her husband respond to — would end up knocking her out for two months.

She got sick on April 3, a few days after the call. She still isn’t fully recovered, though she said she’s lucky because it could have been much worse.

Talmadge and her husband Burton are both Hamden firefighters. Talmadge is the only woman in the department, where she will have worked for 20 years in October.

They work back to back 24-hour shifts at northern Hamden’s Station 9, then they have two days off together. Since they work different shifts, one can always stay home and look after the cows and maple sugaring shack on their farm — Kaycee Farm — which they run on their property on Gaylord Mountain Road.

It was still early in the pandemic when her husband, on his shift, responded to a call from a resident whom he helped take to the hospital. The shift before his had already seen the patient in the wee hours of the morning, but had left her at home. No one had known she was sick. Then, when Talmadge’s husband responded to the call, the patient said she was experiencing body aches.

“We were like wait a minute, body aches?” recalled Talmadge.

On April 1 Talmadge and her husband got a call saying the patient had tested positive for Covid-19. All three members of Talmadge’s husband’s shift, and all three members of the previous shift, had to quarantine for 14 days. Since Talmadge lived with her husband, she also had to stay home.

Talmadge got sick before her husband, though he was exposed first.

“The first symptom was an awful headache,” she said. ​“I’ve had sinus headaches, I’ve had tension headaches… This was debilitating. It was kind of where you didn’t want to move.”

The headache started on Friday, April 3. Then came a sore throat and body aches. The next morning, she woke up with a fever.

That day, a Saturday, she went down to New Haven to get tested. The first test came back negative, but she was told to still assume she had it. After her husband got sick a few days later, she got tested again. This time, the test came back positive.

“It was not a very big surprise that time, but it was nice to have paperwork that supported how sick I was,” she said.

The next three weeks were a blur, she said. Neither she nor her husband could do much of anything other than lie on the couch. They had debilitating headaches, fevers, body aches, sore throats, nausea, loss of taste and smell, difficulty breathing, and a mysterious rash. When they needed something to help with the symptoms, they would call Yale New Haven Hospital’s Covid-19 hotline and one of the nurses or doctors on the other end would give a prescription.

They got medicine for the nausea, and something for the diarrhea. They took something for the coughing, and they took Tylenol for the headaches.

Friends would go to the pharmacy to pick up their prescriptions and then drop them off in their mailbox. Friends and family would also drop off food and take care of their dogs. Talmadge’s husband turned 50 while he was sick. Talmadge’s daughter came and held signs and balloons for him from about 30 feet away.

Hospital Rejections

One by one, they both had a scare. First, Talmadge’s husband nearly passed out. He was in the hallway and then lowered himself to his hands and knees and told Talmadge to call 911.

“He’s a paramedic, so it takes a lot for him to call 911,” she said. When the ambulance arrived and took his blood pressure, it was 70/40, much lower than normal.

He went to the hospital, where he got a bag of IV fluid. And then after what seemed like just an hour, he called Talmadge and told her that he needed a ride home.

Talmadge herself was still extremely ill. She was in no condition to drive. She said they thought about calling on a friend from the fire department to drive him, but then they would expose someone else to the virus. So, Talmadge got in her truck and drove down to New Haven to pick him up.

The next week, it was Talmadge’s turn.

“I was very, very short of breath and very tired. Doing anything was exhausting. It had been a month already, and I was like, geez, this is really a long time to be sick,” she said.

She went to the emergency room, and a nurse put an oxygen monitor on her finger and had her take a lap around the nurse’s station. No one touched her, and no one listened to her lungs. Her blood oxygen level was too high for her to be admitted to the hospital, they told her. They prescribed her a strong antibiotic, which she did not end up taking, and sent her home.

On The Mend, Off The Mend

Slowly, Talmadge and her husband began to get better. ​“We’d have one or two good days and then be down for the count again. Finally, the good days started to get longer,” she recalled.

Talmadge’s husband began to feel better again, and thought he was ready to go back to work. He got tested, and the test came back positive, though he was mostly recuperated.

Talmadge had also been feeling better. But the weekend after her husband’s test, the fever, body aches, sore throat, and shortness of breath came back.

She began to wonder whether she and her husband could be giving it back and forth to each other. Some medical professionals they talked to said that wasn’t possible, and that living together wasn’t an issue. Others disagreed, and said it’s possible they could be keeping each other sick, since there is no conclusive evidence to show that an infection confers immunity.

They decided not to take any chances. Talmadge called her training officer and asked if the dorms that Quinnipiac University had opened up to first responders were still open. They were.

About two weeks ago, she moved out of her house into an apartment in a university-owned complex where she is currently the only resident.

She brought a fork, a knife, a spoon, a teapot, and a toaster with her. But there are no pots or pans in the apartment, so she’s been supporting her favorite Hamden restaurants: MiKro, Texiko, Ray and Mike’s, Café Amici, Eli’s on Whitney. She had lost 15 pounds when she was sick. Hamden’s restauranteurs have helped her gain it back.

While she’s been holed up at Quinnipiac, her husband, who is now fully recovered, cleaned the house. He sanitized everything, and even threw out one of the couches.

Last week, Talmadge went to the CVS rapid testing site on Sargent Drive. The test came back negative. Still, she stayed at Quinnipiac, though she does go home for short visits. She said she wanted to get two negative test results in a row before moving back into her house. She said she’s still feeling short of breath, though other symptoms have gone away.

Her husband went back to work on Memorial Day. Talmadge said her metric for going back to work is whether she feels she could fight a fire. There was a brush fire and a lost hiker at the same time last weekend, and she thought: ​“Could I be huffing it through the woods with equipment on my back? I couldn’t even take a flight of stairs today.”

Talmadge got tested again after her negative CVS test result. The test came back inconclusive. She got tested again on Tuesday. On Thursday, the results came back: positive.

So, no going home yet. Friday marks eight weeks. It could have been much worse, she said. Some people don’t get better, and she’s still feeling better each day.

But, she said, ​“it gets a little difficult after eight weeks just trying to give yourself a little pep talk everyday.”

Previous Pandemic Diaries:

• After ICU Shift, Coming Home To Family
• Ramadan Offers Pause During Pandemic
• Nursing Home Hell
• ICU Nurse Pivots To ​“New Territory”
• Covid Claims ​“Big E”
• Ray Of Hope Slips Through ICU Glass Doors
• The View From Inside The ER
• Doc Glimpses Coming Covid-19 ​“Storm”
• Day 20: I’m A Fighter, Not A Quitter
• Cops Roll With ​“Change Of Conditions”
• The Distance Between Us Diminishes
• Seniors Stuck In Stop & Shop Jam
• Burial In The Age Of Covid-19