It was on a drive to see her horse that Laura Hillenbrand had her first inkling that something was wrong.

Her chest felt like it was wrapped in duct tape. She wasn’t congested but felt a need to cough.

She turned around and returned to her home in the small Oregon town where she’s lived since 2015.

That was 25 days ago. Since then, other classic symptoms of the coronavirus emerged: extreme exhaustion and a terrifying struggle to breathe.

Hillenbrand is the best-selling author of “Seabiscuit: An American Legend” and “Unbroken: A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience, and Redemption.” She spoke this week about the illness and how her decades-long experience with chronic fatigue syndrome prepared her for the isolation coronavirus requires.

Listen to this interview on the Beat Check podcast.

Hillenbrand, 52, has been public about her diagnosis of chronic fatigue syndrome, which she contracted at 19.

Here are excerpts from The Oregonian/OregonLive’s conversation with Hillenbrand. The following has been edited for clarity and length.

Hillenbrand, author of the best-selling book, "Seabiscuit: An American Legend," shown with her retired racehorse, Pants. "He's whimsical and all joy and the silly name fits him," she said. (Photo credit: David Mackintosh)

Question: Laura, how do you feel today?

Hillenbrand: I am getting enough air, but I have to work pretty hard to do it. I’m not in terrible distress, but I’m nowhere near well. It’s kind of been stuck for a couple of weeks now in the same place where I’m not really getting better. I am reassured by a pulmonologist yesterday that that is not unusual, that this virus is ferocious and it takes a long time to get better from it. And so I am just going to wait it out. I am OK, but I don’t feel good.

Question: Can you talk a little bit about the onset of the virus?

Hillenbrand: I actually was driving out to see my horse and I noticed that my chest was really tight and kind of had it in the back of my mind: It’s been this way all day. And at that moment, I was realizing, wow, I just really want to cough, but there’s no congestion. And it just felt like there was duct tape wrapped around my chest and I was a little concerned about it. It didn’t occur to me right at first that this was a symptom of COVID. I don’t think of this kind of symptom as being something viral. So I didn’t go see my horse. I decided to go home and I just continued to feel bad. My throat started to hurt a lot. My mouth got very raw and I quarantined right away from then on. And it was just difficult to breathe. I was coughing a whole lot, but nothing was coming up, just completely dry coughing. And I started to get chills. I started to get some shaking on and off. It wasn’t horrible at that point, but I didn’t feel good.

I was concerned about trying to figure out what was going on, why I was having difficulty breathing. And for the first two days, I felt pretty bad. I was really sucking air. It felt a little bit like I was breathing through gauze but it didn’t get worse. And I thought, OK, I seem to have this. I’m fitting the description of this, but I probably will just have a mild case. I’m not in the official high-risk groups.

And I did OK for a week. I didn’t feel great. The breathing problems would get better and worse. I got progressively more exhausted each day and I tried to take a walk on day six or so and I was just completely wiped out by a very short walk, like I think I made it two houses away and came back and I was just panting.

But I hung in there for seven days. And on day eight, the sky fell.

I woke up struggling to breathe, really struggling now. It felt like I was breathing through a honeycomb. I was just gasping, only getting half breath. My breath was hissing and I was starting to feel really lightheaded. I wasn’t getting enough air. I was working really hard to breathe and still not getting enough air.

I texted a friend who is a health care worker and she came rushing over it with a pulse oximeter.

She threw it to my boyfriend because we’re in quarantine. He threw it to me and I started taking numbers and giving her fingers through the window to show her what the numbers were. A hundred is normal. Anything below ninety-five, you get worried. I was at ninety-three, ninety-one, eighty-nine. And by the time I’m at eighty-nine, I am not thinking straight. I am shaking like crazy. It was becoming difficult to make a choice of what to do because I was getting so foggy headed.

Hillenbrand went to the local hospital and was tested for coronavirus. The virus was not detected, but reports of false negatives are well documented. She said physicians diagnosed her symptoms as COVID-19 and told her to quarantine at home.

Writer Laura Hillenbrand recently discussed her experience with coronavirus: "It’s been a godsend to me to meditate. I do visualize my lungs while I meditate. I visualize the breath opening them and softening them because they are literally stiff with inflammation with this disease." (Photo credit: Spring Milward)

Hillenbrand: I hear people think it’s just a cold. It’s nothing like a cold. It’s nothing like the flu.

Your airways are so dramatically inflamed that your lungs get stiff and they can’t accept much oxygen. And they start basically closing themselves off so you’re breathing really hard and it’s not helping that much to get the proper amount of oxygen into you. And I’ve never had a flu like that, certainly not a cold. It’s nothing like a cold.

Question: What’s the progression of the illness? When did you start to recover?

Hillenbrand: I’m not getting better. I’m just kind of staying at the same place of having difficulty breathing, having shortness of breath. I will walk 25 yards and be so out of breath I’ve got to sit down right on the spot and just sit there and pant for a while before I get up. Now, the pulmonologist I spoke to yesterday said, ‘You just have to be patient. The likelihood is you’re gonna get better. You just have to wait.'

This thing is a beast and it comes loaded for bear. And basically, it’s going to take a long time to get better. He said, you know, expect another month of feeling pretty sick before it starts to get better, which would be two months for me since I got it.

Question: What has it been like to be a patient of the pandemic that’s sweeping the county and the globe?

Hillenbrand: I have chronic fatigue syndrome. I’m very careful about germs and about just taking care of myself. And the fact that I got it anyway testifies to how easily transmitted it is so that’s an amazing thing for me. I also feel so compassionate toward the people who get this much worse than I do. The pulmonologist said that I reside in the land between the 5% who crash and burn and the 80% who get it more mildly -- and mild in their clinical definition here only means you are not hospitalized. So you can get really, really sick and still be called mild with this disease. And he said mine is worse than the 80 percent, but it’s not as bad as the crash-and-burn people who end up on ventilators or they die.

I definitely get a taste now of what these people are feeling when they get to this point where they can’t breathe. This has never happened to me in life. I normally sail through respiratory things and not being able to get enough air and feeling the distress of of your lungs, feeling a sense that you have been hit in the chest with a baseball bat, this sense of stunned lungs, is very distressing.

Question: How do you suspect you contracted the virus?

Hillenbrand: I am a writer. I’m not out in the world all that much, but my boyfriend, who lives with me, works at a ski resort and they have a lot of Chinese tourists up there and people from other affected regions. I have heard that a lot of ski resorts had outbreaks come out of them. He worked up there, hands on, lots of people, lots of tourists.

And he came home coughing one day. And I actually assumed he was coughing because we had spent time in our riding arena with our horse who was knocking up dust and I thought for a day or two, ‘Well, he just has a scratchy throat from inhaling dust.’

And then he was saying his throat was sore and he ended up getting the same symptoms I did, just much more mildly. He is supernaturally healthy.

Question: You’ve written about your own experience with chronic fatigue syndrome. Do you feel that experience prepared you for the isolation and ups and downs of coronavirus?

Hillenbrand: Yeah, sure. I have had ME-CFS (myalgic encephalomyelitis/chronic fatigue syndrome) for 33 years and for the first 25 of them I was almost entirely housebound. There was a span of two years that I didn’t leave the house once because I was weak. There were big stretches of time when I didn’t even get down my staircase because I simply could not walk that far. And so I am an Olympic-level self-isolator. That’s not hard for me at all.

I have lots of coping techniques for that. So yeah, I was definitely prepared for that kind of thing. It’s not a big deal. And of course I have been until now much healthier and getting out in the world a lot, but I’m still a writer and I still work at home and I work in an office and I’m accustomed to a more solitary life.

Question: What are some of your coping techniques?

Hillenbrand: I learn to structure my days, to try to spend some time doing things that are good for my mind. I meditate every day. Right now, I’m meditating several times a day. I try to spend time listening to audiobooks and getting away from the news, especially right now. I can’t work right now. I’m too sick for that. I tried to for a couple of days and I just felt wiped out by it.

I’m good at arranging my life in a way that minimizes a feeling of loneliness or stir craziness. It’s been my entire adult life that I have had to live in a compromised way and you do get accustomed to it in time.

Question: What sense do you feel you’ve developed the most reliance on over the years?

Hillenbrand: I think all of my senses have been cultivated by the isolation so that I’m capable of being very alive to very tiny details, whether it’s a sound or a scent or a feel with my fingers. Anything that is sensory I am very highly attuned to that. There were a number of years that I spent completely trapped in a bed, in a room with nothing new to look at and I learned to look out the window at the trees and fantasize shapes in the tops of the trees as the wind blew them. I would see different shapes in them and make up stories with that.

I am intensely alive to everything that comes into my senses. There is not one in particular. They’re all very hungry.

I never lose a sense of gratitude of being able to go out into the sunshine and feel the sun on my skin because I couldn't do it for many years.

All those things that people take for granted, I don't. I never will.

Question: What has it been like to meditate given that practice is so focused on breath, something that’s a struggle at the moment?

Hillenbrand: It’s been a godsend to me to meditate. I do visualize my lungs while I meditate. I visualize the breath opening them and softening them because they are literally stiff with inflammation with this disease. And I focus on the oxygen flowing through my body and it does feel like that changes things.

It’s important when you have something that is as distressing as the loss of the ability to breathe normally, that you have something that can bring you some peace because it’s very frightening to not be able to breathe. The thing you need first and most is to be able to get air into your lungs.

I am using meditation to be at peace with the limits of my breathing right now, to still feel very calm in it and know I am getting enough.

I highly recommend that to anybody with this because it helps you have peace while visualizing healing for your lungs.

Question: Before the virus and even now, how do you stay connected to people, to the world?

Hillenbrand: I did disconnect in the past. Before the internet, when my illness hit, I really lost touch with everything and everybody. The world just went on without me. And those years are kind of, it’s kind of like I was not alive during them. I have very little cultural memory from that time.

I didn’t know what people were doing or how the language was changing. I just wasn’t there. I was in a room. I just spoke to almost no one. I had very little contact with anybody. There would be a lot of days when I saw no one at all.

In more recent years, the internet has been a great gift to me. It has enabled me to reconnect with everyone I used to know and lots of new people and to write books and to have a career. When I was writing my previous two books, I was very sick for both of them, but I was still able to do them and do the research largely because of the internet -- and telephones, of course.

It's amazing how much you can be in the world in a state of physical compromise. I have been able to learn how to do that.

I have a lot of great friends on Facebook. I feel like I have a wonderful social life out there. And of course, now I'm healthier so I have a lot of friends in real life that I see.

It’s something that’s a little bit of an art. I had to come out of my isolation into a whole new world where everything was different to me. I didn’t know the technology. I didn’t know how the culture had changed. You know, I go to a grocery store and not know how to do this self-checkout thing. This was mysterious. I’ve never pumped gas before.

But of course, the good side of that is it’s all brand new. It’s all a gift I never expected and I am an elated person a lot of the time just from an ordinary thing. The beauty of a drop of rainfall on a leaf (can) put me in raptures because I have the privilege of seeing that, whereas I didn’t for so long and I never thought I’d get better. So I am a very blessed person.

Question: How had you been feeling before you contracted coronavirus?

Hillenbrand: I still have ME-CFS. I’m much, much, much better than I was. I still had limitations. Stamina was the biggest problem. But a lot of things I had completely conquered. I was very fit. I was lifting weights every day and doing a lot of muscle things, a lot of balance things.

I still have had trouble with vertigo, but it's not as bad as it was. And other symptoms, smaller symptoms are there.

I’m definitely not completely well, but I was up to a point of functioning where you would think I was a fit and healthy person to look at me and I could spend a day with you and you would have no idea that things were going on with me. Some of that is I’m able to adjust to them.

So I actually was doing better than ever just before this happened. I was working out harder than ever and really pushing to try to beat back more of those symptoms and get closer to being well. And it’s been really frustrating to have to stop all that and be afraid that a relapse could come. And that is something I don’t know, but I am just going to believe it’s not going to happen.

Question: What brought you to Oregon?

Hillenbrand: My boyfriend lived out here and I can’t fly because of vertigo. So he in 2015 drove to (Washington) D.C. and we took a drive across the country. It took 24 days. It was 3,700 miles because we meandered so I could see all the things I’d never seen. I’d never seen the mountains. There were so many things I’d never seen. I’d never traveled the country.

And so the whole thing was this wondrous experience where I would scream with delight in the car at the redness of the grass in Kansas or the Badlands or all of these resplendent things in nature that I’d never been able to see and great cities. And it was it the best experience of my life to do that. It was hard. It was scary. It was very dangerous for me to do. I just had to believe I could do it. We just had to manage it very carefully, only drive a little bit each day. But we made it. And I arrived healthier than when I left. That was the most amazing thing.

Question: What’s Oregon been like for you?

Hillenbrand: It’s such a different world because I mean, I’m a DC born and bred kind of girl. My dad was a lobbyist. My mother wrote for The Washington Post. It’s such a different world. It’s so beautiful out here. And people are so kind. It’s such a gentle pace and a gentle way of living. It’s been wonderful. You walk into an orchard and you can pick cherries, the best cherries you’ve ever had just right there. And you get a bucket and weigh it and pay a few bucks.

Everything has been magical out here. It’s really a beautiful place.

I never thought that I would get out of that bedroom. I never imagined anything like this. The breadth of possibility in a person’s life is so much greater than most of us recognize because I thought that I would live the rest of my life in that bedroom and die there. And I was wrong. I was so wrong.

Question: May I ask what you are working on now?

Hillenbrand: I am writing a biography of someone amazing, a woman. I’m not telling people exactly what it’s about, but it is an extraordinary story, an amazing person. I will tell people when I’m ready to, but I don’t even have a book deal for it or anything. I’ve just tried to work on it now, get the research done and get things in shape.

And I’m excited about it. It’s taken me a long time to find that subject I can fall in love with the way I did with Seabiscuit and his people and Louis Zamperini and his story and finally I found one that just hits me right between the eyes. So I’m excited to be working on it.

-- Noelle Crombie; ncrombie@oregonian.com; 503-276-7184; @noellecrombie

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