Petaluma doctor catches COVID-19 while healing the sick

Since March, Petaluma resident Dr. Elisa Pujals has spent an untold number of hours on the front lines of the coronavirus pandemic in a neighboring county.

Monday through Thursday, suited in an armor of gloves, masks and a face shield, she administers tests to fatigued patients, listens to the unmistakable crackling of afflicted lungs, and monitors tell-tale symptoms of COVID-19.

She’s seen nearly every stage of the disease at her clinic, she says, sometimes affecting entire families and sending patients to emergency rooms. For months, the coronavirus has dominated every second of her work life.

But when she started feeling unwell on New Year’s Day, the 41-year-old doctor and mother to two young children was unsure if she had been infected.

“My first symptom was nausea, so it was very easy to confuse that with other things,” Pujals said. “Even though I’m hypervigilant to COVID, that first day I was not convinced I was really sick, not until the next day when I had a headache and body aches.”

Despite spending so much of her time attending to positive cases, it wasn’t until her own battle with the virus did Pujals come to fully understand its complexity, and how differently it can manifest, especially in those early days.

She was fatigued, yet also suffered from insomnia. She had searing back pain and a squeezing headache. Sometimes, her nose burned and she felt winded. Pujals started wearing a mask indoors at all times, and found herself in the heartbreaking position of distancing herself from her affectionate 5-year-old and 7-year-old kids.

On Saturday, Jan. 2, on her second day of feeling ill, Pujals drove to a private testing center in Petaluma to get a rapid antigen test, seeking results as quickly as possible, despite an accompanying price tag. It came back negative, she said, yet over the next few days, she continued to feel worse.

But the most challenging symptom was one that she never expected.

“The biggest surprise was a lot of anxiety,” she said. “I don’t suffer from that, so it was so uncomfortable to be feeling that. I think part of that is not just influenced by the scary things you read, or being worried about what might happen. I think it’s part of the pathology itself.”

In the early morning hours of Monday, Jan. 4, after days of strange symptoms, Pujals was finally sure she had COVID-19, when she discovered she had lost her sense of smell. That day, she visited two separate clinics to get PCR tests, considered to be the most reliable type. On Wednesday, both came back positive. It had been six days since her first symptom.

Although the positive results were a relief, Pujals said she couldn’t shake a feeling that she had somehow made a mistake, or was letting her patients and colleagues down.

“It’s taken over our lives at work. It’s all we talk about, it’s what we’re working to prevent,” she said. “So when I got it, I felt like I failed in my mission. I know psychologically it’s not true, but it’s the one thing I was trying so hard to avoid.”

It took her two full weeks to feel healthy again, Pujals said, admitting she still logged on to work virtually as often as she could while fighting the virus from her bedroom quarantine.

Now back to work and fully recovered, the family doctor says she’s developed a new kind of sympathy and understanding of her patients’ COVID-19 experiences and symptoms, knowing first-hand how varied they can be.

“As a physician, we’re counseling everybody to think about any mild symptoms,” she said. “Because, everybody has a different course. It could come and appear differently than you expected, so even if you start feeling a little weird, I advise people to stay home and get tested.”

(Contact Kathryn Palmer at kathryn.palmer@arguscourier.com, on Twitter @KathrynPlmr.)