[title subtitle=”WORDS and IMAGES Dwain Hebda”][/title]
Among her other activities, Addison Fulbright of Cabot, Arkansas, plays catcher on her national tournament-qualifying softball team. Why that’s noteworthy is because as anyone who follows the sport knows, the catcher is the pivotal position on the field. The catcher and pitcher are the only two players who handle the ball on every play, and while most casual spectators’ eyeballs are on the pitcher, it’s the catcher who faces the field and proactively directs the defense.
Base runner showing steal – the catcher has to see it. Outfield not in position – the catcher moves them over. Runners at the corners – the catcher makes sure the infield remembers the count and where the play goes. There’s a reason the catcher is considered the field general, an extension of the coach.
So, when both of Addison’s parents came down with the coronavirus this spring, the household was in good hands. Even if the Cabot twelve-year-old didn’t feel that way at the time. “Actually, I was kind of freaked out,” Addison says. “My mind would always kind of go from good to negative like anybody else’s would. But I tried to stay positive. And we prayed a lot.”
“I give her an A+,” says her mom, Jessica. “She was very accountable; I don’t know that I would have been this accountable at twelve years old. I was very thankful she was responsible. We didn’t even have to ask, she just triumphed.”
“She makes us feel really good and proud,” says John, her dad. “I told her I was super proud of her stepping up when she needed to.”
Addison comes by her responsible, count-on-me nature honestly. Both of her parents have lived by the same code, leading lives of service to their fellow man, their community and their country. Jessica joined the Army National Guard right out of high school and there, she got into nursing.
Today, she continues to tend to her fellow vets at the John L. McClellan Memorial Veterans Hospital in Little Rock. John also walked off the high school graduation stage into the military, enlisting in the U.S. Marine Corps. For the past eighteen years, he’s been a Little Rock firefighter and, truth be told, doing his job is likely what made him sick.
“I ran into a positive patient at Little Rock, so I had a known positive exposure,” John says. “Didn’t have any signs or symptoms. We had all of our PPE on, everything. “Looking back, initially I had a headache and kind of felt a little cool, but I didn’t think anything about it. I took a Tylenol. Later that night, my wife woke me up about three in the morning (March 23) and said I was burning up so I took my temp. It was one hundred and one-point-nine or something like that.”
John got tested later that morning and medical authorities confirmed coronavirus three days later. The diagnosis was a seventy-two-hour formality, considering the freight train of symptoms that hit him almost immediately – progressively more severe body aches, persistent fever, loss of smell and taste. Finally, he had such difficulty breathing it required a trip to the ER and several days of treatment in the hospital.
“The first two days at the hospital, it was very hard just to hold a conversation because I would get winded,” he says. “My conversations with Jessica were short and to the point. I would have to take a breath in sentences.
“About day four in the hospital, I started taking a turn for the better. Had a pretty good day, but then that night I had a bit of a temperature. Here I’m thinking I’m getting better and now I’m getting worse again. The next morning, day five and six, I didn’t have any fever at all. Felt a lot better, but I knew I wasn’t back to one hundred percent. They sent me home with a little portable oxygen tank and slowly over the next week or so I started getting a little more active.”
John was tended full-time by Jessica, who’d been told to stay home from work due to the positive exposure. Addison pitched in with chores and kept tabs on her seven-year-old brother Trey, trying to take her mind off worrying about her parents. “The first day, I wasn’t really concerned as much as I was whenever he started getting worse,” Addison says. “Then I started calling my friend and I was just talking to her on the phone in tears because of how scared I was the night my mom took him to the hospital.
“I was really concerned for my mom, too. I know she was talking to her friends, trying to keep them updated and stuff. She had a lot on her hands. So, I was trying to constantly text her to see if she needed anything. I did the same thing with my dad.”
After days of caring for her husband, Jessica sat in a recliner to rest and felt chills coming on. “I was like, ‘Uh-oh,’” she says. “I took my temperature and my temp was like one hundred-point-six, one hundred-point-eight, and it just kept climbing. I knew then. I put on a mask and quarantined myself to the spare bedroom that we have.
“I got tested March 27, I took him to the hospital March 28, I found out I was positive on the 29th. I mean, it was just like, wham, bam, bam. My temperature got up to, like, one hundred and two-point-eight; that was about the highest and that was when my body aches hurt the most. The body aches, the fever, that was the worst part of mine.
“Now the worry is starting to set in, the stress. Well, John’s in one room. I’m in the other. What do we do?” This time, Addison took control of the household. “I remember texting my friend and I was like I don’t know what to do. I don’t know if I can do this,” she says. “I knew how to do all the stuff. It’s just, I never had to do it. I might have, a couple times, been made to do it, but just the laundry and clothes, not taking care of my parents.”
For the next week, both kids worked their share of chores and looked out for each other. Addison divvied up tasks and deployed her cooking skills which she’d only recently acquired. Trey remembers being focused on his responsibilities, too. “Do the laundry, fold clothes, do the dishes,” he says of his tasks. “I already knew how to wash dishes, we do it kind of every day.” As for taking orders from his big sister, he shrugs.
Did he follow her instructions? “Maybe a little bit,” he says.
Addison quickly got the hang of running things, especially in the kitchen where she developed the specialty of the house, jalapeño popper hamburgers. Still, as the week wore on, she was ready for the situation to get back to normal. “As much as I hate saying this, work kept my mind occupied. It made the day go by really fast,” she says. “I think one of my toughest things, and that was mine and my brother’s, was not being able to give my parents the hugs and everything we would normally.
That and having to stay six feet away because I don’t want to catch [COVID-19], and always being cooped up in a room.” Today, both parents have recovered and are doing well, something for which all the Fulbrights are thankful. Addison is still handling much of the cooking and Trey has the laundry folding down to a science. Both kids are happy to regain some normalcy but are confident in their newfound ability to handle a crisis, especially Addison, who may have caught a glimpse of her future career.
“My dad, he’s like a superhero, with powers,” she says. “When I was thinking about jobs, and I’ve talked about this with him so much, I want to be a firefighter just like him, because I look up to him a lot.
“This experience showed me not to take the stuff that my parents give me, like the little lovin’s or the kisses or the ‘I love you,’ for granted. It could be taken away from me just like that.”
