Local Amanda Mentor tested positive for coronavirus and is recovering while in self-quarantine.

Special to the Daily

On Sunday, March 8, Amanda Mentor woke up feeling a little off, maybe a bit hungover she said.

“It hit me like a brick wall. Within an hour it was like all of the symptoms came in,” the 32-year-old said. “It was crazy.”

She said she vomited twice, started sweating profusely and had an intense headache. She had to sit down for 30 minutes because she was too weak to walk to her car to get home, she said.

“I knew something wasn’t right,” she said.

Mentor’s symptoms started kicking in two days after the first reported coronavirus case in Eagle County, on Friday, March 6.

“I was one of the first people to get it, I guess, and I don’t really know where I got it from,” she said.

Timeline of symptoms

That Sunday night, her temperature read 102, she said, and she wasn’t able to sleep because “the body aches were horrible.”

On Monday, March 9, she went to her doctor.

“I still felt like death,” she said of waking up Monday after a few hours’ sleep.

Mentor said her doctor asked “immediately” if she had flu-like symptoms, which she said she did, with a cough. She was put into an isolation room and tested for the flu, strep throat and coronavirus, she said.

She was told the coronavirus test would take longer than the flu and strep throat tests.

A couple of days later, she was told, “You don’t have the flu and you don’t have strep, but we don’t know, we don’t have coronavirus back yet,” she said.

“Honestly, it was bad,” she said of the symptoms. “I was bedridden. I was waking up drenched in sweat. My sheets were soaking wet. I feel like I got it a lot worse than a lot of my friends did.”

On Thursday, March 12, Mentor got the call with her results.

“The Department of Public Health called me after hours Thursday night and told me that I was a positive,” she said.

She was told not to leave the house, which she had already assumed.

“They spent like an hour on the phone with me, going over everything I had done for the last 10 days — where I had gone, who I was with,” she said. “I pulled out my planner and went through everything with them. They contact the people they needed to contact.”

Mentor had not traveled in the weeks leading up to getting the virus, she said, and is unsure of exactly how she got it.

“They told me to take Tylenol and ibuprofen and alternate them until the fever goes away,” she said of the Department of Public Health, who calls her regularly now.

Friends have helped Mentor during her time of self-quarantine, picking up supplies and delivering them. On Saturday, March 14, Mentor said she hadn’t had a fever for two days. She said she might be released off quarantine by Tuesday according to her conversations with the Department of Public Health, “but there’s nothing to do anyways,” she said.

“I can see how it’s really concerning for older people,” she said, “because it knocked me down for five days.”

Assistant Editor Ross Leonhart can be reached at 970-748-2984 and rleonhart@vaildaily.com. Follow him on Instagram at colorado_livin_on_the_hill.