‘The scariest part is that you’re isolated all by yourself’: Alaskans describe their experiences with COVID-19

Update: Donna Pratt died on September 5, 2020. In a fundraiser organized by family, a relative wrote, “She is so loved, and will be deeply missed by her family and friends, especially by her husband, Wilburt Pratt, and son, Jason Williams.”

Donna Pratt spent a holiday weekend in Anchorage in July that nearly cost her her life.

The 63-year-old from Juneau first started experiencing what she described as sinus cold symptoms a few days after returning home from the weekend away, her first trip out and about since the pandemic began in March.

A week and half later, she could hardly breathe.

Her husband called an ambulance, and Pratt was admitted to Bartlett Regional Hospital in Juneau, where she was diagnosed with a severe case of COVID-19. She spent two weeks in the hospital’s critical care unit. Pratt spoke with the Daily News from her hospital bed this summer.

“I know a lot of people out there think it’s just a small virus,” she said. “But it’s huge. It can get in your body and take over. Take over your breathing. You can’t even breathe on your own.”

Pratt is one of more than 5,000 people in Alaska who have so far tested positive for the novel coronavirus. Many people with the virus don’t experience any symptoms at all, while others come down with mild cases or grow sick enough to need hospitalization. Forty Alaskans with the virus have died.

In interviews with the Daily News, Pratt and others who became ill described a wide range of symptoms of varying severity, including difficulty breathing, fatigue, confusion, body aches, fever and a persistent cough.

Pratt said she hoped telling their stories publicly would help quell misconceptions people might have.

“People need to know what happens when you go through it,” Pratt said, groaning with pain. “Because of your breathing machine, you can’t move around freely. My neck hurts. My hip hurts. I need a back massage so bad but I can’t get one. No one can touch me.”

‘The scariest part is that you’re isolated all by yourself’

June 3 was the first time Chad Kiesel, 41, from Homer, remembers feeling anything different: a stuffy nose, some body aches.

So he took some ibuprofen and attributed his symptoms to seasonal allergies. But then the pain moved into his joints.

Four days later, he had developed a cough.

“I started to realize maybe this might not be just allergies,” Kiesel said.

[‘I really thought I was losing my husband’: An Anchorage couple shares their experience with COVID-19]

The next day, Kiesel could hardly get out of bed. He checked his temperature; it was climbing.

“I felt terrible,” he said. “I remember thinking, ‘This is not right.‘”

Then he took a COVID-19 test.

His positive result came in a few days later, during a five-day peak in symptoms that left him sick in bed for 10 days, separated from the rest of his family, with a fever as high as 102, a severe headache, dehydration and a loss of smell and taste.

“Another thing I noticed,“ he said, “is I felt kind of spacey. I was kind of just out of it. And then it started moving into my chest.”

That’s when he first started to truly worry.

“Because it was like, ‘Jeez, how much further is this going to go?‘” he said.

Kiesel remembers lying in bed wondering how bad was bad enough to go to the hospital. “The scariest part is just that you’re isolated all by yourself,” he said.

But little by little, day by day, he started to feel better.

Weeks later, the only symptoms that Kiesel was left with was fatigue — “kind of like I’d been beaten up” — a lingering cough, and a slight scratchiness in his lungs, “like I had inhaled a bunch of campfire smoke,” he said.

‘It hit quick, and it hit hard, and we just had the mild cases’

Jonathan Green, 31, from Anchorage, said he started experiencing some “seasonal allergy-type symptoms” in late July.

He and his wife decided to get tested for the virus to “be 100% sure it was allergies, nothing more,” he said.

Green says he, his wife and both his children got positive results back within the week.

His symptoms progressed quickly, and included body aches, chills, fever, dry cough, congestion and “super low energy.”

“I went in a period of two weeks from the time I was climbing mountains off-trail in the Kenai, no problem, to — I couldn’t climb the 14 stairs on my house without having to go lie down. I mean, literally gasping for air for more than a minute,” Green said in an interview in August.

“It hit quick, it hit hard, and we just had the the mild cases,” he said.

In early August, he started to notice tightness in his chest.

“Deep breathing was hard, and felt restricted,” he said. This lasted for about a week.

His two kids had elevated temperatures for 10 days, and his daughter developed a cough and some body aches, Green said.

Besides the slight fever, his 5-year-old son had no symptoms.

Green said it took about two weeks to feel better.

Overall, he’s glad that he and his family had heeded all public health recommendations.

“We’d been pretty cautious about who we interacted with on a close basis, and we’d been wearing masks in public settings,” he said. “So we’re just glad that, according to the contact tracers, we probably didn’t contribute too much to community spread.”

‘I know a lot of people out there think it’s just a small virus’

Donna Pratt had originally been planning a trip to Hawaii with her husband to celebrate their 20th anniversary, but when the pandemic arrived, she knew she had to cancel it.

She has asthma, which means she’s in a category described by the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention as higher risk for severe illness and death from the novel coronavirus.

A shorter trip to Anchorage seemed less risky, Pratt said. She wore a mask the whole time and was very careful to avoid crowds.

While Pratt and her husband were in Anchorage, she said she saw some compliance with public health recommendations to wear masks in public places.

“I saw four homeless people wearing masks, and blue-collar workers,” she said. “But I saw people who were well-off not wearing masks, walking around in the store. And I kept my distance. I saw them coming toward me, I would turn the other way.”

Pratt said one of the hardest parts of the illness was not getting to see her husband and son when she needed them the most.

“I have a wonderful, wonderful loving and caring husband,” she said. “We’re not used to being apart.”

She said she was thankful for the doctors and nurses at the hospital who worked tirelessly to help her get better. “They’re right here by me now. As soon as I called,” she said.

On July 30, Pratt was released from the hospital, on her way to recovery. In a video recorded by hospital staff that day, Donna smiled from her wheelchair, basking in the sun in a butterfly-patterned shirt.

She again thanked the doctors and nurses who made her recovery possible.

“I could not have done this by myself,” she said. “Every day they would come in and say, ‘Donna, you are doing it. You are doing so good. You need to keep fighting.‘”