A COVID-19 Odyssey

When longtime Gunbarrel resident Lori Highfill left Colorado on Saturday, March 14, for a week's vacation in her home state of New Jersey, she never thought that it would turn into a two-month ancient Greek, Homer-esque odyssey. But instead of finding danger with the one-eyed Cyclops giant, she found her trip imperiled by the microscopic Coronavirus.

The original plan was to be gone for a week, returning to Colorado on March 23. The first sign that things might not go as planned was that Highfill's plane was only a third filled. "The s*%# hit the fan from the day I got there," HIghfill said. "Everything shut down," including the Princeton N.J. restaurant where her nephew Anthony Gruich, Sunset Middle School alum, works as a chef.

Like here, restaurants, movie theaters and other non-essential businesses were closed. But what was different, Highfill said, was that "people were wide-eyed and scared to death.... New Jersey and New York were insane."

That insanity refers to the number of deaths and COVID-19 cases in the northeast, which Highfill said caused everyone to be extremely scared. She had a first-hand view of what hospitals were dealing with, because her sister, Debbie Stellavato, a former Niwot resident, is a nurse there.

Stellavato is the director of outpatient infusion at a hospital in Livingston N.J., but during the ramp-up and the height of the pandemic, she worked as a spotter.

"What a spotter does is we watch our nurses 'don and dos' with the PPE equipment," Stellavato said. "We wanted to make sure that people put on their equipment safely and take it off safely, so you don't expose yourself."

Besides the spotter, Stellavato said there was also a buddy system of two nurses in a patient's room to make sure that all protocols were observed.

"Of course, you're anxious. People were working with a disease that nobody knew anything about", Stellavato said. She likened her situation to flying when you don't know where you're going. "We don't know a lot about this disease, all we know is how to protect ourselves and we do it."

Despite everyone's best efforts, Highfill said at the heights of the pandemic, over 1,000 people a day died there. "There were so many deaths and so many cases. People were scared. (In the hospital) people were gasping and coughing, turning blue and gasping for air and turning blue. Nurses would pound on the (ICU) windows to tell people to breath. It was very different from (Colorado)."

There were well-publicized stories of mortuaries running out of room and bodies being refrigerated, plus mass burials on Staten Island "because they didn't know what to do with all these bodies."

Highfill, who works at Ball Aerospace, didn't know what to do about returning to Colorado. She called her boss and the human resources department, saying, "I (was) too scared to travel. ...Do I rent a car, but I (also heard) don't go to hotels, don't go to rest stops. How am I going to drive 30-something hours to get home? How was I going to do that? There was no way I was getting on a plane."

In the long run, Highfill decided to stay in New Jersey. But staying there meant taking extra precautions. She wore a mask and gloves to the grocery store and spent hours wiping down everything she bought. It took her hours to clean and disinfect everything.

Stellavato said that her hospital had enough PPE and ventilators. She took all precautions to keep the virus from her home. But, as often happens, the best laid plans can go awry.

Six weeks after she arrived, Highfill decided it was safe to fly back home. But just as Highfill was ready to return to Colorado the day before Mother's Day, her niece and Stellavato's daughter, Ashley Gruich DeMarco (NHS '05) tested positive for Covid-19. While the rest of DeMarco's family also was sick, with her two-year-old daughter spiking a 103 degree temperature, DeMarco was the only one who tested positive. DeMarco has since recovered.

Because Highfill had been exposed to DeMarco during the incubation period, Highfill had to postpone her trip home for another two weeks so that she could self-isolate.

Highfill finally made it back to Colorado at the end of May. She said she couldn't believe how relaxed everyone in Colorado seemed to be. "It just blew up in New Jersey," she said. "I don't know why it's different here." Maybe it's the population density, the poverty level, and the number of homeless people she pondered. "I don't know how to explain it, but it's totally different than here."

As of May 30, The Denver Post reported while there had been 1440 deaths "among cases" due to COVID-19, there were no new deaths reported since Friday, May 29. Current hospitalization rates continue to decline.

Unlike the Cyclops, the virus isn't vanquished, but Colorado seems to be headed down the right path.