Georgia is in the exact center of a blended family, with two older brothers (Matthew and Taylor), a step-brother one week her junior (Harper), and a step-sister four years behind them both (Riley). My husband, Patrick, and I joined households in 2014 and the two girls, both accustomed to being the baby of the family, were instant mortal enemies forced to share a room and a bunk bed.

I started a new job the day after the national emergency for Covid-19 was declared in the US. I was the construction manager for Intel’s R&D campus in Hillsboro, Oregon and my role was considered essential in 2020. At the same time that I was leaving early to work 12 hour days, the kids were sent home to lead a life of leisure for months until the school districts could coordinate remote instruction.

Georgia was especially at home in an online learning environment. She thrived at maximizing her own efficiency to spend the least amount of time possible on schoolwork and joined the zoom classroom calls only twice a week for a couple of hours at a time. She used the rest of her time on more important things: Watching and rewatching the entire MCU catalogue in chronological order, learning to moonwalk, and perfecting her origami skills.

She turned 15 in April of 2021 and was immediately vaccinated. Back then, we thought vaccination made us bullet proof and we booked a family cruise to Mexico for the coming Christmas holiday with my mother and my sister’s family to celebrate making it to the other side.

In August, I was diagnosed with a rare disease called Relapsing Polychondritis. It is a progressively degenerative autoimmune disorder that can be fatal and the realization that I am mortal hit me hard. For the next few months, I was focused on learning everything I could about autoimmunity and the underlying causes and symptom triggers; I was completely engrossed in worrying about myself and even the kids became an afterthought. I am the main breadwinner for our family and I was obsessed with the need to make sure my family would be taken care of when I died, which I was sure was about to be any day.

Another emotional reaction to my illness was the sudden need to complete my bucket list and live life fully. To this end, we looked forward to the cruise with even more anticipation as the memories we would make became even more important to me. I remember we all met for brunch in Long Beach before the walk down to the cruise terminal; my sister saw a story on the news about the rise of the Omicron variant. To set us at ease, my mother shared an article about how cruises were the safest vacation to take right now; our cruise was fully vaccinated and required masks when indoors. Where else would we find such safety measures in place and still be able to spend time together?

As expected, the family cruise was amazing. The kids were crammed four to a room, but they were living their best lives, hot tubbing early, ordering room service, and spending their vacation allowance on obscene amounts of bulk candy. They rode horses, snorkeled, and almost forgot we were in the midst of a global pandemic.

My mother tested positive for Covid-19 the second to last day of the cruise. Given the timing, we suspect she was exposed on the flight down. She ran a fever for a night and then felt fine, but obviously couldn’t fly, so she made the trip back up to her home in Idaho in a rented car through a snowstorm. No one else in our party tested positive, so we were allowed to fly home. It was Christmas Eve and we got in late, but Patrick and Georgia ran back out to buy stocking-stuffers so I could rest. We were all cautiously watching for symptoms, but we are diligent maskers, so we were optimistic we got through it unscathed. The day after Christmas, we took new Covid tests at Kaiser and again all tested negative.

That same evening, Georgia began to get a sore throat, but she didn’t say anything until she came downstairs the next morning and entered my office to tell me about it. I stopped her with a frantic raised hand and ordered her back into her room. Testing was not easy to do back then; I ran around to multiple stores trying to find a rapid test to give her at home, but never found one. Her father brought one over eventually, but when she finally took it, she had already been isolated in her room with a fever for a couple of days and we didn’t need a test to tell us it was Covid by then.

Her fever only lasted about a day before passing quickly, but the sore throat took a full week. She was sicker by far than my mother had been, but we didn’t have enough experience to know what to expect. Somehow, miraculously, no one else got sick from that trip. Omicron was everywhere at that time and every household seemed to have a close contact or exposure within the same few weeks. The guilt I felt for taking the family on a cruise in the middle of a pandemic was lessened slightly by the realization that the kids would have been exposed anyway at their father’s house.

Georgia was not old enough for a third booster shot at that time; the FDA would not approve them for kids under 16 until a few weeks after her infection. We now know that immunity wanes swiftly after the initial series of mRNA vaccines. She was fully vaccinated in May and by December would have had very little immunity left. Later studies would show that vaccines reduce the risk of Long Covid following a break-through infection, but Georgia was unlucky.

The initial infection abated, but a new illness crept in to take its place. Her muscles ached and felt heavy. Her heart raced just from sitting up. She couldn’t think or remember words. Her head pounded with a pain in the center of her forehead all the time. She often seemed like a different person, no longer the good-natured family comedian, but now irritable and angry. And so tired. Fatigue was not a sufficient description for the overwhelming full body exhaustion that plagued her at all times. Light, sound, movement, and even thinking would bring on what we learned to call post-exertional malaise, so every day she laid in her bed or on the floor in her room with the blinds drawn, the lights out, and silence. Everything changed the day she became ill. It was as though she was frozen in time while the rest of us kept moving forward.