By Brooke Schultz

LINCOLN — “There’s a space between living and dying — a breath, a moment, a beep on the heart monitor,” Paige Deiner wrote in a Facebook post Feb. 24. “I have lived in that space for days.”

It all started with two COVID-19 tests. Ms. Deiner’s daughter, Jinx, 15, walked into her room on a Tuesday in October 2021 with a hallucinogenic fever, so Ms. Deiner got her tested.

Positive for Jinx, negative for her mother.

Jinx recovered in about three days, but by that Friday, Ms. Deiner had a fever and cough.

She was 24 weeks pregnant at the time, with her son, Soren Deiner Meritt, born in December. A doctor friend warned Ms. Deiner that she’d have to seek medical help if her blood-oxygen level dipped below 89, so she got herself a pulse oximeter to keep an eye on it, she said.

“My COVID test was negative. I was like, ‘I think I just have a cold,’” she recalled, remembering symptoms of troublesome breathing and coughing.

Each day, the pulse ox dropped, and she began struggling to get out of bed. Jinx called Ms. Deiner’s mother, thinking a hospital visit was necessary.

“I didn’t want to go,” Ms. Deiner said. “I remember distinctly being like, ‘If I have to go to the hospital, can you at least take me to McDonald’s? I want a sweet tea.’ I was like, ‘I’m not sick. There’s nothing wrong with me. This is all just stupid.’”

But as her mother drove her to the hospital, Ms. Deiner recalls asking her to pull over because she felt nauseous. When she vomited, there was blood everywhere, she said.

“I looked at my mom, and I was like, ‘I guess I don’t need that iced tea so much,’” she said.

When Ms. Deiner got to the hospital, she remained there for a month. She’d be placed on a ventilator for more than a week. She would have a 106-degree fever. She’d undergo numerous blood transfusions.

And afterward, she’d have to learn to walk, talk, swallow, tie her shoes and write all over again.

“In the pause,” she wrote in her Feb. 24 post about her time in the hospital, “lay all of the answers to life’s biggest questions — the knowing of every philosophy ever invented, an archetypal understanding of people and purpose, and peace. Nothing pulled at me, spirit was at the helm. I simply was.”

Pandemic changes plans

Ms. Deiner, 41, is a Delaware native; she grew up in Lewes, attending Cape Henlopen schools. Her career in journalism took her to Central America, Arizona and Texas, as well as Delaware’s own Coast Press.

Then-teenagers Michael Muñoz and Celia Zamora Muñoz “adopted” her, she noted, and she has cared for them ever since.

Eventually, she left the news industry and went back to school to become a massage therapist, so she could stay home with her younger daughter, Jinx. She went into practice in that field about 12 years ago, and when Jinx was 11, she started graduate school to get a doctorate in Eastern medicine.

She took a leave of absence from school, with a plan to stay in Mexico so her daughter could unplug, but a week before the pandemic arrived in Delaware in March 2020, her Milford home burned to the ground.

“My house burned down, the pandemic started, and the borders closed within, like, a two-week period,” she said. “So it was really challenging. I think grief has a way of just being hard. There’s a lot of grief. I don’t think that necessarily people think how much you’re attached to a feeling of home — not so much your stuff but a place to be. So that was hard.”

She recalls shopping at Walmart at the time, picking up items that ran the gamut from clothing to bedding, because she didn’t know how long they’d be staying in a hotel after the fire.

“I just remember people staring at me, like, ‘How dare you?’ while they’re fearfully running through Walmart,” she said. “We had just been through a tremendous tragedy. So I didn’t really think about COVID.”

But as the pandemic unfolded across the state and nation, dinners with her parents stopped. Her family split, with her two older children getting an apartment together nearby. She and Jinx moved into a new home in Lincoln in summer 2020.

Like many others, Ms. Deiner continued her education remotely — which she didn’t mind, she said. As vaccinations rolled out, she and Jinx got the shots.

Illness progresses quickly

And then, on Oct. 7, 2021, Ms. Deiner was admitted to the emergency room, expecting to be home within hours, she said. The following day, she was diagnosed with COVID-19 pneumonia with blood clots and transferred to ChristianaCare’s maternal health ward in Newark. She was there for just seven minutes, she said.

“My oxygen was so low that it looked like a scene out of a movie. They had doctors and nurses … and ran me through the hospital to the (intensive care unit),” she said.

It was there she got sicker and sicker. She was placed on the ventilator Oct. 10 but removed 10 days later. She spent the next two days facing delirium, hallucinations and memory loss, she said.

By Oct. 22, she could not talk or swallow. Hospital staff used a feeding tube for several days. She began therapy for speech and swallowing, as even water would make her choke.

On Oct. 27, she faced a cardiac incident after some movement by a catheter used for intravenous antibiotics, nutrition, medications and blood draws.

“COVID was like a pingpong ball through my body,” she said. “It started with just regular COVID, which turned into COVID pneumonia. Soren somehow moved, probably because I had a high fever, and sat on a kidney, which caused kidney failure, which probably led to a really, really high fever. And then, your body always compensates. So then, I was having liver problems and vomiting a lot of blood. I think there were micro-tears in my stomach. Then, I had a (catheter) move, which caused some cardiac problems.

“It was kind of like a perfect storm of a disaster.”

She was transferred from the ICU to a high-risk pregnancy unit Oct. 28.

Her time in the hospital was the longest she’d ever been away from Jinx, she said.

“It’s hard to see your parent like that,” Jinx said. “You come to terms with the fact that they’ll die or get better.”

That was the hardest part for Ms. Deiner.

“If you’re going through it, you’re going through it. There’s nothing you can do about it. But the people who have to watch you go through it, I think they’re the ones with the bigger challenge,” she said.

Those close to her coped in various ways.

One of her best friends read the obituaries for two weeks after Ms. Deiner had texted him she was in the ICU with no further communication, she said.

Ms. Deiner’s mother, who became her medical power of attorney, learned the shift changes of the nurses and would call every day to check in, being unable to visit due to COVID-19 restrictions.

“I think she and my daughter probably had the hardest time because she had to make all these decisions that moms don’t want to make,” she said.

During her time in the hospital, Ms. Deiner went back to writing. Some of that, she said, came from her frustration with people who didn’t believe in masks or science, and she hoped her story could create change.

It was also a place to mentally process the illness, since she had time on her hands, she said.

“I think that people think you get sick, and you get over it,” she said. “I think that, sometimes, we don’t recognize (that,) for many people, the journey is just beginning when you get out of the hospital, and your challenges are just starting.”

Finally, on Nov. 3 — about a month after she was first admitted — she was released from the hospital. She went to her parents’ home in Lewes for about a week because they have an elevator, and she couldn’t climb stairs.

“I think that was really hard for them,” she said.

Even following her release, she was still vomiting, had to take medicine multiple times a day and had to receive daily injections of blood thinners in her stomach. Over time, she would be able to cease the medication and only administer the injections, which left her bruised.

“It was the best thing ever when they stopped,” she said.

In the month before Soren was born — he made his appearance about three-and-a-half weeks early, on Dec. 7 — she also worked with speech and occupational therapists.

“I was having a lot of challenges with, like, everyday life,” she said.

Lasting symptoms

While she hasn’t had many cognitive issues, like the brain fog that some get after bouts with the coronavirus, she does worry a little about studying Chinese medicine as part of her degree.

“You have hundreds and hundreds of points and combinations to memorize,” she said. “It’s not like a paper that you can fudge it. … So I worry a bit about that because I think my brain is not as malleable as before.”

And even though she said she’s never been a great singer, now she can’t sing along with the radio or even raise her voice. She could only drink juice for a while because the viscosity was more than water and therefore easier to swallow.

Additionally, because she had trouble tying laces, her mother gifted her a pair of slip-on sneakers.

“It’s funny, I can hold an acupuncture needle, but I can’t hold a fork,” she said, adding, “There’s the feeling of like, well, I should be normal, like I got out of the hospital. I had a baby. And then, I can’t figure out how to do something. And I’ve learned that there’s a lot of humility in life. I think I’ve lost some arrogance.

“There’s something to be said about looking at a meal and being like, ‘Well, I can’t eat this because I can’t cut it up unless somebody wants to cut it up for me.’”

She said she was always the kind of mom who was up for an adventure, remembering a time when she and Jinx backpacked through Central America for several months. But now, everyday tasks have become harder.

“I’m kind of a Type A person,” she said. “I’m used to getting things done: I ran a business, went to grad school, raised a kid by myself. Like, I’m not used to being like, ‘Hey, can you tie my shoes?’”

In addition to occupational therapy twice a week, she started physical therapy this month because, as Soren grows, she worries about her balance when carrying him.

In her first session, she learned she had a significant loss of strength, mostly on the left, and a considerable loss of balance, she said.

“I’m very grateful to be alive. And I’m grateful Soren’s fine. But I think that there’s an expectation to some degree that you’ve made it through something very challenging, and your life is supposed to do a 180,” she said. “My daughter said it pretty well the other day. She’s like, ‘My mom, I think, lost her magic.’ And I don’t think I lost my magic. I think that it’s just that everyday tasks are a little bit harder.”

Two years since the first case of COVID-19 was detected in Delaware, mask mandates, states of emergency and mass vaccination clinics have surfaced and gone.

Then, a surge of cases in the winter — along with a continuous breaking of records for positive cases and hospitalizations in a day — brought back the first brushes of March 2020, with testing clinics, briefings from the governor and indoor mask mandates.

But now, after Gov. John Carney said Delaware is entering a “new phase” of the pandemic, mask mandates have once again ended.

In response to her personal experience with COVID-19, Ms. Deiner said she saw how disjointed and individualistic the culture was.

“Because we’re going to have another one. It may not be COVID, and it may be something else,” she said. “I’m very lucky. So many other people weren’t that lucky.

“And I think we owe it to the people who weren’t lucky, to honor what they went through, to say ‘never again.’ And that means having a more cohesive, more unified world. And I’m not sure that’s going to happen.”