After waiting on hold for almost an hour, I was told by someone at the New York State Department of Health’s coronavirus hotline that in order to qualify for testing, I had to have been in direct contact with another person who had tested positive. Unfortunately, I told the representative, I have not been in direct contact with the Utah Jazz over the past 14 days, but I had been in direct contact with my husband, who at the time was in bed with a 103-degree fever. That wasn’t sufficient. However, given Josh’s symptoms and his recent business travel to places where there had been documented outbreaks, she would allow him to get a test. Someone from the health department would call me back to schedule it, she said, adding that because of HIPAA, they wouldn’t be able to leave a message. I was advised to keep my phone on me at all times. Two days later, I missed a call from an unknown Schenectady number while I was helping my son in the bath. By then, I had begun experiencing light symptoms: headache, low fever, a disappeared sense of smell.

When Trump told the American public that he didn’t want to let the 21 infected passengers of the Grand Princess cruise ship, docked temporarily outside of San Francisco, to disembark because “I like the numbers being where they are,” he was saying the quiet part out loud: keeping the U.S. case numbers artificially low would boost his reelection chances, and he didn’t mind telling us so. Therefore, getting tested meant more to me than just finding out whether I had the virus, which I likely did. It came to symbolize a small but significant act of political rebellion. It was important to be counted, to participate in this horrible, perverse census of the sick.

Having a seizure while on a ventilator is what it took to get a timely test result. The following day, March 23, I found out what I knew already: Josh had COVID-19.

After my husband was admitted to the hospital, he texted me to say that he had finally been tested. They were also trying some new treatments on him, notably the combination of the antibiotic azithromycin and the antimalarial drug chloroquine, the one that Trump keeps touting as a miracle cure despite the fact that any doctor will tell you that there’s insufficient evidence to say whether it actually works. I was elated when Josh texted the next day to say that the doctors thought he’d improved slightly. I tried to call him several times after that, but he wasn’t answering his phone and the hospital by then was getting overwhelmed with incoming COVID cases. The nurses kept asking me if I could please call back in an hour. By 10 p.m., I fell asleep, not realizing that patients with COVID often improve before their condition falls off a cliff.

When I checked in the following morning, I was informed by a nurse that my husband had been in “respiratory distress” so they had no choice but to put him on a ventilator. I don’t think I ever have fully appreciated what it means to be beside yourself until that moment; it was an out-of-body experience. This could not be happening. It didn’t compute. Josh does yoga three times a week. He has no preexisting health conditions. How was this possible? I put AJ in front of the TV and FaceTimed my sister to tell her what was going on.

“I’m all alone,” I said from our parents’ bedroom in Long Island. “No you’re not,” she said from her living room in Berlin. We cried together, apart. She told me to lie down and count as I breathed in and out. She offered to call our parents—they had recently moved to Florida—and give them an update. It was 7 a.m.

A few hours later, I received a call from the hospital. The doctor on the other end of the line wanted to know if Josh worked in the woods or had recently spent time outdoors. “No,” I said. “Why?” He had had a seizure—a “rapid deterioration” in his condition. She thought it was possible that he had somehow contracted bacterial meningitis. Normally, they would perform an MRI or a spinal tap to rule out a central nervous system infection, but because he was on a ventilator, they couldn’t. The doctors didn’t even know yet whether he was COVID-positive because the private laboratory running the testing was so backed up. When I called back later, a kind nurse promised me she would call the lab and push to move Josh “to the front of the line” given his critical condition.