The text came mid-morning as I was getting ready to start work from home on a Tuesday.

A friend had flu-like symptoms: dry cough, sore throat, muscle aches. She was sitting in a COVID-19 assessment centre waiting to be tested.

I’d been at a small dinner party at her apartment the previous Friday, along with four others.

That was the day they closed the schools. Ashen-faced public health officials appeared on TV and suddenly seemed worried after weeks of telling us everything was fine.

Things seemed to be changing fast. They were warning that events with more than 250 people should be cancelled. But they still hadn’t confirmed spread in the community beyond people with travel histories and their close contacts.

No one at the dinner was sick, no one had recently travelled.

As we entered the apartment our host, a doctor, ordered us to immediately wash our hands. We lathered up with soap. We felt almost smug.

It was Friday the 13th, which now seems almost too much.

I remember manically wiping down the bottles of wine I had brought. It felt almost like an overreaction.

My friend had prepared chicken, Kimchi and greens. She handed me a cocktail.

We were there for a few hours, around her small table, laughing, eating and drinking. I washed my hands several more times over the course of the evening, and sanitized again once I left.

Maybe I hugged the host goodbye? We definitely joked about not doing that. I took the TTC home. It’s a fine line between being prudent and paranoid, I thought.

On Saturday, I was supposed to meet a couple of other friends for dinner and a movie at TIFF. But that afternoon the theatre closed. We decided to stay home.

On Sunday I went into work, feeling fine, and talked to about half a dozen people who were there. Luckily, we were spread out around the newsroom, and I washed and sanitized my hands constantly.

As a breaking news reporter, I sometimes think about all the little decisions we make in our lives. So many of them don’t matter: do I wear the black shirt or the grey shirt? Do I have coffee at home or at the office? But every so often one will have a huge impact on your life.

There were several decisions like that over those couple of days, that I or others made, that ended up mattering. Like the fact that we cancelled our Saturday plans, and that we were already working from home on Monday.

The next day, when I saw my friend’s text, I honestly wasn’t that worried about myself, a healthy person in her 30s with a great immune system

I was concerned about my friend, the others at the dinner, and the dozen or so people who had been at the office on Sunday. I quickly fired off an email to my managers, listing everyone I’d come into contact with.

I didn’t want to jump to conclusions, but I stayed inside. Just to be safe. Another small decision that ended up mattering.

“I feel fine,” I said over and over again in emails, texts and phone calls.

Even as my friend got her test results back: positive.

I started to feel a bit tired in the evening, going to bed early.

Still, it was hardly anything, maybe a little cough.

I’d had worse hangovers.

It wasn’t that I wasn’t worried.

I’d been obsessively washing my hands, trying not to touch my face, stockpiling soup and ginger ale for weeks as I reported on the slow news drip of local cases and joked with colleagues that we’d all be in quarantine soon.

I was worried, for older relatives and colleagues, about the economy. I assumed if I got it, it would be mild. My biggest fear was that I would infect someone else.

It was mild until, suddenly, it wasn’t.

On Friday night, a week after the dinner party, I started to feel a strange burning pain in my side.

It got worse and worse. Around 3 a.m. I woke up and suddenly was very conscious of my breathing, which seemed laboured. It felt like I couldn’t get enough air in my lungs. I panicked.

It felt like too much to dial 911. I decided to call my parents, over two hours away in a different city. In retrospect, I don’t know what I expected them to do.

Luckily, my mom is a retired nurse and was very calm. She told me to take two extra-strength Tylenols and try to go back to bed, which I did.

I stayed in bed for most of the next four days. I’d call friends on FaceTime and feel winded. Taking a shower felt like I’d run a marathon. I didn’t lose my sense of smell or taste, like some patients have reported. But I had absolutely zero interest in food, forcing myself to eat a few crackers or arrowroot cookies.

It wasn’t that I couldn’t breathe, but I felt like I couldn’t quite make it to the top of a breath. Nights were the hardest: I’d lie there and try to imagine my lungs filling up with air again like the bike tires I’d pumped up on my last trip outside.

People asked if it felt like a bad cold. For me, not at all. My nose and throat didn’t feel congested. It was something much deeper that felt wrong.

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Someone from Toronto Public Health called every day to check up on me because I was connected to my friend’s positive result. She told me I was now a “probable case” because I had symptoms and had been in close contact with a confirmed case.

This was great, and I know they’re totally overwhelmed and doing their best. But it was kind of scary to feel like you’re just left alone to deal with everything. She recommended hot tea.

Fortunately, I had friends, family and coworkers checking up on me, including one who delivered some more supplies, and another who sent a pizza over. I had food I could have made. But that Tuesday, I didn’t even have the energy to walk the few steps in my less than 500-square-foot apartment to my kitchen, open a can of soup and microwave it. Or navigate a food delivery app. Tiny tasks felt impossible.

That was the worst day. Eventually I dragged myself to the shower just to sit in the steam and let it loosen the stuff in my chest a bit.

The next day I felt a bit better. I tried to keep drinking water, and hot tea, which did help, as did more showers and watching YouTube videos on breathing exercises.

I never did get tested, unlike my friend, who was prioritized because she’s a doctor.

At first they said they didn’t test people who don’t have symptoms. Then I was still told they were rationing tests for healthcare workers and people with compromised immune systems. Plus, by then I could barely walk to the bathroom, so I wasn’t going to be making a trip to wait at an assessment centre, and, without a car, I didn’t know how to get there without putting an Uber driver at risk.

I was happy to see that Toronto Public Health has started counting “probable cases” like me in their daily totals. As of April 2 there are 170 probable cases in the city, along with 727 confirmed cases, for a total of 897.

Slowly things started to get better. I’m just trying to have patience with the process. Netflix’s “Tiger King” is helping.

It’s been three weeks since that dinner party and now that I’m back to normal I can recognize how lucky I am. Lucky that people were checking on me. Lucky that I had a home to recover in and an employer that let me take time off to do that.

Lucky that it wasn’t as bad as it could have been and my immune system did its job.

But being that sick makes you scared. Scared for other people in your life who might not be able to take it. Scared for the healthcare workers trying to stem the tide of the sick. Scared for all the people who didn’t make it, who just kept having a harder and harder time breathing until they stopped.

From what we’ve been able to put together and from talking with public health, my friend the doctor did not get it from the hospital (she sees patients but was not treating anyone with COVID-19).

So there was definitely community spread in mid-March — I don’t know why that information wasn’t shared sooner — and there’s absolutely community spread now.

Officials warned Wednesday we need to keep up strict social distancing for at least another 12 weeks to avoid becoming another New York City, a new epicentre of the virus.

The world I was infected in is a different one than the one I will find when I finally get out of quarantine. I still haven’t been outside because I was told by a doctor at my family clinic (via phone) not to until I have 48 hours without any symptoms.

Now that events are cancelled, borders are shut, and planes are grounded, it’s not just going to be the international conference attendees and the people getting back from the U.S. who are sick.

It’s going to be people, like me, who saw just a couple of friends. Yes, older people are more at risk, but younger ones are not immune.

Somehow, even reporting on this for months, I was not worried for my own health. I had gotten the impression that unless you’re a 90-year-old with three preexisting conditions you don’t have much to fear from this virus.

This is not true.

In Canada, people under 40 make up 12 per cent of COVID-19 hospitalizations. In New York City, there are people in their 20s and 30s in the ICU on ventilators.

Thankfully, it looks like I didn’t infect anyone at work, or anyone else on the street because I stayed inside as soon as I knew I’d been exposed, and didn’t see any other friends after the dinner.

We’re still learning every day about this virus and guidance sometimes changes. But Toronto Public Health told me close contact was within two metres, for more than 15 minutes.

Five of the six people around the small table for a few hours at that dinner got sick. We are all fine now, thankfully.

There are many people out there who won’t be fine if they get this.

I think we all have a bias that makes us believe we will only be infected by strangers — that our own people are pure. But this is not true. Some of them are infected and some of them will infect us. Some of us will be infected without symptoms and infect them.

I know many of you are going to be faced with lots of decisions over the next few weeks. Do I risk going to see my older parents? Can I visit my grandma on her birthday? Is just one meal with a friend OK?

For now, the answer to all of those questions is no.

Because all of our decisions have a special weight right now. Any one of them might completely upend your life or the life of someone else. That’s what defines this time, more than panicked toilet paper buying, or working in our pyjamas.

So let’s make the right decision: stay home.