MANILA – Cager Chris de Chavez of the Batangas City Athletics in the Maharlika Pilipinas Basketball League successfully recovered from coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) while staying at his hometown in West Orange, New Jersey, USA.
He described the virus infection as the “toughest challenge” he faced in his life so far as it also spread to his family.
“I beat this. I had the will power to beat it. Even though I was scared for my mom, scared for my dad and scared for my uncle, I knew this virus was not gonna beat me and my family,” De Chavez said in an interview with Chooks-to-Go Live.
He decided to go home to his parents and be with his daughter, who was in Florida, after the Philippines enforced an enhanced community quarantine to curb the spread of COVID-19 on March 15.
“It all started the first week of April. My mom’s a nurse for 30 years at our local hospital. She’s a real frontliner, she goes to work every day, and she’s exposed every day. Sometimes, things like that are unavoidable,” De Chavez said of his mother Lilia.
“One day, she got home and she wasn’t feeling well. I stayed because I told her: ‘If you’re sick, I’ll take care of you.’ A few days later, I got sick. I was bound to get sick because I was doing all the stuff for her,” he added.
According to de Chavez, all four of them, including his brother and father, got tested but the results did not come out until a week after.
“That first week I got it, it was super tough. I first thought it was just a mild fever, but it kept me bedridden the whole day. I was trying to sleep, taking Tylenol all day and then my body started aching,” he said.
“I worried about my dad a lot. He was really sick and I was hearing him moan and groan in bed. My dad didn’t sleep for five days straight. He took Nyquil for two days and he still couldn’t sleep. His body aches on top of the fever. Nothing’s working for him,” he added.
“The second week, that’s when I started feeling congestion on my throat, that this could be real serious. My mom would always complain that she can’t breathe. It was the same with my dad. That’s when we started worrying a little bit and that we had to go to the hospital,” he further said.
Rather than admitting themselves to a hospital, the family quarantined themselves in their own household.
“You can go to the hospital and still die from it. It’s just super unpredictable,” he said. “My mom has experience and she knows that if we go to the hospital, we have to wait for a longer amount of time. We’ll probably spread the virus to the other people.”
“It gave me a different perspective in life and how we take just a simple blessing such as our health for granted,” he added. “It definitely changed my perspective and hopefully, we can carry these values for the rest of our lives.”/PN
