I currently live in Salt Lake City, but I’m originally from the New Mexico side of the Navajo Nation and still have cultural connections and citizen connections there—I’m still voting there. There are coronavirus outbreaks there now, in my small community of Naschitti, but I wasn’t there when I caught it. It’s likely that I was exposed when I was traveling in early March on a business trip from Salt Lake to Washington, D.C., and New York City.

I flew back to Salt Lake on March 8 and went into the office that week, all regular hours. I went to my workout and did everything I normally do routine-wise. After my workout, I came home and I felt ill. I was feeling it in my throat. I had body aches in my lower back, a neck ache. Then it started going into fever. And then body chills, and then I started coughing a dry cough. Later, I started to get the tightness in my chest.

I was concerned, so I started going through the Covid-19 hotline in Utah, and that hotline was just a mess. It was just not available or responsive. The hotline referred me to Intermountain Health Care in Salt Lake City, which referred me to ConnectCare, an app where you can talk to providers over the phone or FaceTime. I tried to get through there but couldn’t because it was overloaded. There were at least 10 people ahead of me each time. And each time I had to pay a $60 co-pay just to talk to a provider, even though I never got to talk to one.

The next day, I remember waking up chilly and heated. I was like, shit, I’m scared—not even just scared, but the anxiety of it was like, What is it that I have?

My friend told me I should go get screened or ask for a test. I first called the local Indian Health Service center here in Salt Lake City, Sacred Circle Healthcare. It’s run by the Goshute Tribe. I told them my symptoms and that I had just traveled from an outbreak zone. I was referred by them to go to Intermountain headquarters in Murray, Utah. They said that was where most of the screening and testing was happening. So I went there. They referred me to the visitor emergency room and gave me a mask.