Plumas Case No. 3-one year later
By Debra Moore
Linda Hill, Confirmed case No. 3It’s been one year since Indian Valley resident Linda Hill became ill with the coronavirus, ultimately confirmed by a COVID test April 4, 2020.
She was Plumas County case No. 3 — that’s back when the Public Health Agency issued a press release each time an individual tested positive.
Plumas News interviewed her July 23, four months into her illness, when she called to share her story. We followed up with her again this week, wondering if she had fully recovered from her symptoms. The short answer is – not entirely.
She hasn’t resumed her vigorous exercise routine and her sense of taste remains impaired.
“I’m doing OK,” she said. “It took over six months for my lungs to heal; the fatigue hung on for a long time.”
And she really misses a morning cup of coffee and an evening glass of her favorite red wine. “I loved coffee, always had one or two cups,” she said, “but now it just tastes awful.” And she has poured out several bottles of wine; hopeful that at some point it will taste good again.
Still, it’s a vast improvement from what she was going through a year ago.
Hill, then 71, was a longtime employee of Family Court Services in Quincy — and that’s where she suspects she contracted the virus.
“I was in the office alone and a woman came in … she was so sick … she looked like she should be in the hospital,” Hill recounted last July. “She was coughing and coughing. I backed away.”
Hill said that she was so shaken by the woman’s state that she walked over to the courthouse to see if she had been there as well. The sheriff’s personnel who screen people at the front door did not recall seeing her.
“A few days later I felt off,” Hill said. Other people in her office had been sick earlier in the winter, and Hill said she experienced a few symptoms then, but this was different. She experienced fatigue and listlessness, but hadn’t really started thinking about COVID because she wasn’t experiencing the classic symptoms of high fever and cough (the symptoms most discussed at that time).
Then she had trouble breathing, and decided to take what she uses to treat her Lyme Disease — colloidal silver. Her breathing plateaued — it didn’t get noticeably better, nor did it get worse.
She recounted that during the third week she thought she was improving and moved around a little more. One evening she took a shower and then it suddenly changed. “I couldn’t breath; I could not get air and I started blacking out,” she said. “I ran outside on my covered porch and put my head between my legs, and I caught one breath. Then another.”
Hill didn’t call 911 because she lives rather remotely and knew help wouldn’t arrive in time. When her breathing stabilized she went to bed, but arranged for a test the next morning. Positive.
This was still early on in the pandemic and her doctor said she could go to St. Mary’s in Reno, but she elected to stay home. She had supplies, and friends brought fresh food to her porch.
In the following months she often smelled a strong chemical order and continued having breathing problems, particularly during the fires.
Despite being in a high risk group — both due to her age and to her underlying health conditions — Hill survived.
She attributes her resiliency to being in very good shape at the onset of the disease, taking supplements including B-12, using an inversion table that she believes moved stuff around in her lungs, and taking the colloidal silver. When her mother, sister and niece contracted the coronavirus in the Sacramento area, they also took the colloidal silver. “My mom is 89 and got COVID and I was worried sick about her,” Hill said. “She took little sips of it. She never ended up in the hospital.”
But she knows what worked for her and her family might not work for someone else, since everyone’s experience is different.
