Friday, January 8, 2021: In the afternoon, Dorothy began to feel sick. (Rowen and I also got hit with it, but we got over it pretty quickly. Kelvin says that he never felt sick at all.)

Dorothy ran a fever for a while, into Saturday, before it broke. She spent the next couple of days sleeping a lot, though not continuously. On Monday evening, she was cheerful and seemed to be doing better.

However, she went to sleep early on Monday night, and for all intents and purposes kept on sleeping for several days. She woke for a while on Friday night, and still wasn’t feeling all that good, but she was still in reasonably good spirits.

Over the weekend of January 16-17, she started to get worse. She returned to full-time sleeping, but now every once in a while, she would intermittently moan for several minutes before dropping back into sleep. The few times that she was awake, she seemed to be increasingly unaware of her surroundings. I was having a hard time getting her to eat, and I was concerned that going several days with very little food was clouding her mind. I also knew that she wasn’t drinking enough water.

By Sunday night, the moaning had become nearly continuous, and I decided she needed to be at the hospital, and so we went in shortly after midnight on Monday morning.

At the hospital, they found that her oxygen levels were very low (which is the actual reason she was losing awareness of her surroundings). She also tested positive for COVID-19.

Over the next three days, she seemed to be improving. The hospital staff were introducing oxygen through face masks at first, and then via nasal tubes later. We were even able to speak to her by phone on Tuesday night. She was clear-minded and expressed that she was feeling better, and she requested that I bring some personal belongings to the hospital (which I did the following morning).

However, Wednesday night and Thursday morning, things took a turn for the worse. Her oxygen levels plummeted, and she returned to not being aware of her surroundings or being verbally responsive. We made the tough decision to put her on a ventilator at that time.

Since mid-day Thursday (January 21), she has been sedated and on the ventilator. The staff there are periodically moving her from side to side in order to improve her lung condition. The plan has been to give her time so that she is increasingly breathing on her own before bringing her back from sedation.

Today, four days later (January 25), her lung capacity has remained pretty much unchanged, and we are all still waiting for things to improve.

My intent is to use this site to pass along updates on Dorothy as I get them from the hospital staff. At this point, though, it seems like Dorothy has a long road ahead of her, and the situation may not change much from day to day in the short term.