Dawn

Age at interview: 40

Brief Outline:

Gender: Female
Ethnicity: White British
Background: Dawn is 40 years old and is White British. She is married with two children works as a school teacher. Dawn was worried about catching Covid because she has diabetes which makes her higher risk. When her and her family did get Covid, she was surprised how different everyone’s experience was.

 

More about me...

Dawn first heard about Covid when she was at work as a school teacher. Her first thoughts were about what would happen to schools. She was also concerned about her own health because she lives with diabetes, which puts her at greater risk. Dawn’s colleagues also expressed concern for her health. She recalled the headteacher of her school saying “I think you need to leave. I think you’re obviously in the higher bracket for risk.” One of Dawn’s children was also at increased risk because they have Addison’s disease. The teacher at her child’s school phoned Dawn early on in the pandemic and said “can you come and pick her up please. We don’t feel comfortable with your child being in school.”
 
Dawn remembered the Government’s advice that you should not leave your house unless you had to. As Dawn and her child had long-term conditions, her husband was the person who went outside the house. Dawn says that this was “quite an eye opener because we spent so much time together.” She said that her family made an effort to do things together while they had to isolate. Some of these activities included walking, cooking, and baking. As she puts it, “we tried to make every day important.”
 
In September 2021, Dawn went back to work full-time after the stay at home rules ended. She said that she was very fearful of returning to work because she would be teaching thirty-five children in a classroom who were not expected to wear face masks. She also realised there was no two-metre distancing and no rules at her school to try to keep the staff and students safe.
 
Another challenge that Dawn faced when she returned to school was the amount of students who had lost family members to Covid. She says that she became her students’ support network. She also explains that some of the children became a danger to her because they were sent into school despite having family members who had tested positive for Covid. Dawn herself found the government rules very confusing at the time and wishes that the guidance on Covid was much clearer.
 
Dawn’s symptoms of Covid were itching from head to toe, sickness, and diarrhoea. She says that she had “symptoms I didn’t know were symptoms until track-and-trace contacted me and said they were quite common symptoms with Covid.” One of her children and her husband also tested positive for Covid. As soon as her family were tested positive they decided to clean the entire house and make sure that they did not come into contact with anybody else. What was most suprising to Dawn was that her child with Addison’s disease never tested positive for Covid. She explains that she found this “astounding to be honest because she’s the child whose got the auto-immune system condition.” She believes it was because she was taking vitamin D and steroids for her condition. Dawn said that the experience of having Covid was an eye-opener because everyone in her family had different symptoms and they all felt completely different.

 

Dawn wonders why her status changed from ‘extremely vulnerable’ to ‘vulnerable’ when no other protections had been put in place.

I was a front line worker so I was back into school, even though I had, on the previous lockdown, being classed as extremely vulnerable. They changed again. They changed the rulings and was extremely vulnerable to vulnerable. It was very confusing.

Dawn found that helping others made her feel better.

I find that the way we cope in our family is by giving and it seems a little bit odd but I think the more you give, the better you feel. So I think, as a family unit, we are all giving people. So we always, even if it’s time that we could give to somebody and just listen to them, it’s a massive thing but it’s okay staying safe and it’s okay making sure that you do the sensible thing and keeping your distance and keeping, you know, your hygiene with your hand sanitising and masks but I think you’ve got to keep yourself mentally as well knowing that you are impacting on somebody else, who might be completely on your own.

Dawn, a school teacher, felt for her it was never ‘if you get Covid, but when you get Covid’.

To be honest, I am quite well controlled at the moment. I’ve lost seven stone within the last probably four years. So I am probably fitter than I’ve been in a very long time. So there are people with diabetes who probably were at higher risk than me but, in my job role, I feel like my risk was higher. So, for example, if I had diabetes and I worked in an office with twelve people, then I understand that. That, you know, you can socially distance a little bit more. You can stop as much contact with as many people but, in my job role, my risk was no less because I was in with, I was in the thick of it I mean with, like I said previously, thirty five children plus all their families plus all their siblings. So my risk was very high and I was, it was never, if you get Covid. It was when you get Covid. It was, I felt there was never going to be an option for me in my job role.

Dawn, a teacher, felt that she would definitely catch Covid at school.

I really do feel like I got Covid from school [sighs]. If children aren’t - is it asymptomatic - you know, they’ve not got the symptoms, but they are carriers. And, if you are working in an environment where there are thirty five children in a small classroom and you are less than one metre away constantly, and these children are coming into school when they have got parents at home that are showing symptoms and are being tested or, even if they are asymptomatic, you are putting yourself in a situation where you are in contact with hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of people because that one child then goes home to their parents, their siblings, their siblings who have been in other classes, you know. It is bound to happen, and I definitely know, hand on heart, that I got it from work because I had not seen anybody else.

Dawn took her daughter to get tested and decided to test too. She was shocked by her positive result because she had no symptoms.

At the beginning of December, one of my daughters was showing symptoms so we got her tested and it kept coming back negative and, on the off chance, because I was staying at home with my daughter and she did have symptoms but was testing negative, I got tested at the same time and I came back positive, which was a huge, huge shock to all of us.

Dawn’s family caught Covid in October 2020. She was surprised about how Covid affected them all differently.

Yeah, it was quite surprising with our youngest daughter, she is a tough cookie and it really, it hit her harder than it hit me and she’s a fit young fifteen year old and she had the taste but only for a short period of time, loss of taste, but she did have horrendous headaches and a temperature that lasted probably a week and she was bed bound for a couple of days, which was quite difficult because we were all poorly at different points, including my husband, who is an athlete. He runs marathons, triathlons, very, very fit and he tested positive but was, said, “Oh, I’m fine, I’m fine.” Then, two days later, it completely knocked him for six. He was, he had the temperature and the headaches and it took him quite a few weeks to recover his breathing, when he was running. It took, it did take it out of him for quite a while, a good month I’d say after.