DIXON, CA (MPG) - When Leah Marlin, 49, was wheeled down the hospital corridor to go home, nurses and doctors stepped out of their stations to clap and cheer. She was a bit embarrassed and asked why they were cheering. He responded because she was alive. That’s when it really hit her how close she came to dying and the significance of her sleep disturbed night after night with dispatches of “Code Blue in this room or that room” that sent nurses and doctors running down the halls, she said.

She is home now but she isn’t alone. She shares her life with a long clear tube that pumps oxygen into her recovering lungs from an oxygen tank in her bedroom after having the Covid-19 Delta Variant and being hospitalized for nine days at Kaiser.

“We were carrying on just like everybody else. We wore masks when we went out but without thinking about it when we got gas or went out to eat. We weren’t really being careful,” said Leah who serves in the American Legion Post 208 Women’s Auxiliary and manages the Veterans Memorial Hall here in Dixon. “It was Aug. 4 when I started getting symptoms. I first noticed a little cough for a couple days. Then, my son came in and we couldn’t smell or taste anything.”

Leah and her family had gotten together with her Mom and Dad for dinner and four days later, everyone but her Dad got sick. At first, she reassured herself that Covid is just like a cold and she’d get through it but hadn’t factored in that she had underlying causes; scar tissue in her lungs from a virus when she was a child resulting in asthma.

“I was the most miserable I have ever been in my life, and it seemed like all I ever did was cough. I could not breathe. I couldn’t even talk. I just wanted to sleep,” she explained.

Her husband, Josh, also got sick as well as their 17-year-old son Andrew. The nurse on the phone heard them coughing and said to go to the ER but just to wait in the car. They were given instant-results tests and told to go home and quarantine. That was a Friday night.

“But then the coughing went full blown,” Leah said. The mucous changed to green and it was hard to cough plus she was aching and had a fever. Andrew got over it after spending three days in bed and just “snapped out of it” by day five.

“But, he’s young and healthy,” she said. Leah was not as fortunate. When her husband said it was time to go back to the hospital on Sunday, it was because he was scared for her. He could see that his wife “was not there.”

“I was not responding. He said my eyes were rolling and I was out of it,” she said. She remembers nothing about that or getting to the hospital, but she does remember being put in a wheelchair and the staff not letting Josh stay. She sat in a corner of the ER for five hours without water"'although that tasted like acid anyway"'before she called her husband and insisted she be taken home. He said if she got worse, they’d call an ambulance but the nurses warned him that she’d still lose her place in line; the floors were filled and there wasn’t enough room.

“I remember being so mad at him because he said I had to stay. It was 11 hours before I got to lay down and they let me have ice chips but anything that didn’t have a flavor tasted like a chemical and had a metal taste,” Over the next several days doctors and nurses came in and asked questions and it came to Leah that not even the doctors really know what this is, she said.

“They are learning as they go.” She didn’t want to eat or drink and she lost 32 pounds. But, her IV fed antibiotics, D3 and zinc into her continuously. It wasn’t until four days later that she even wanted to be awake, she said. “I wanted all the wires off me but they said my oxygen was still too low and they had me doing breathing exercises.”

“They were very careful to put on all the protective gear and changed my bedding every day,” she said. “When I had gone three days with oxygen getting better, they let me go home but only after they delivered oxygen tanks to my house.”

That’s when they wheeled her down that long hallway and everyone was clapping and congratulating her and telling her not to come back. She questioned what the fuss was all about.

“You get to go home but there’s some who we wheel out that are not alive,” said the nurse.

“I wouldn’t want anybody to go through what I went through,” Leah mused quietly. And, now that she was home, Josh was “really nervous.”

“He laid awake and listened to my breathing. I didn’t care. I just wanted to sleep. But, he lost a lot of sleep,” she said.

“It takes a lot out of me to take a simple shower, and I had to take a nap after sweeping the floor,” she said. “It’s just crazy and I get frustrated real easy because I want to do things like I used to do daily. A million things...but I’m hooked to a 50-foot tube that I’m dragging around the house.”

“Then I think about all that I went through and how sick I really was and it makes me upset because people don’t realize how serious this is,” she emphasized knowing if you have an underlying condition, for example. “The one thing I wish I was more proactive in knowing about Covid and that I blew it off as political crap. I would be more careful. I would have washed my hands more, used sanitizer more and wore a mask more.”

When their family had dinner together, only her Dad was vaccinated.

“He could have been the carrier but he was the only one who didn’t get sick,” she said. People who have been vaccinated can still be a carrier and pass it on so it behooves all to exercise caution and even if you have antibodies, her doctor said she still needs the vaccine.

“As much as we have been against the vaccine, now it’s ‘nope!’ As soon as I am able to get it, I will get the vaccine. It’s not an option. People can think they are good or bad and I completely understand, but we are not going to do this again.”