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‘I would wake up gasping for air’: Journalist shares her personal COVID-19 story

WPBF’s Jossie Carbonare contracted COVID-19 in the summer of 2020.

The two testing sites in Palm Beach County have reopened their phone lines this morning to begin scheduling appointments. At first, when the pandemic started, we knew it was a big story, and as a journalist, most people know when big stories happened. You’re covering it every day, but this has been a non stop thing for over a year now. So as the days went on, the weeks went on and we had a new, different Covitz story every day. I knew that this was huge. I knew that that this was gonna be something major in my career and also obviously happening in our country. As a journalist, you’re writing part of history, and you get to tell the stories that are happening as they happened. One of the most important things that I feel that I have covered so far through the process has been the first few vaccines. About 2400 doses of the cove in 19 vaccine will be administered between today and tomorrow, here at the Mid Florida Credit Union Event Center in Port ST Lucie. When we first started to get those doses within the counties that we cover, I got the opportunity to go to different hospitals and see them administer those vaccines to the doctors and the nurses and the staff, which were priority in our state here in Florida. But I just felt like that was such an honor and a neat thing to be a part of, and it really makes you appreciate your job. Regardless of all these things that are going on. Those are important topics to cover and information that that is necessary to, you know, provide for the public. I’m asthmatic. And when I do get sick, a small cold typically really affect me. So I knew that if I got covert, it would have been good for me. So I was super careful. But I remember it was a Friday right before Fourth of July weekend. I thought I had allergies. It was a work day. By the end of the day, I started to feel really tired. I worked morning shift, so I thought, Okay, well, you know, maybe I just had a long day. By the time I woke up Saturday morning, I need my whole body just a cooked and hurt. I’ve never felt like that before. Sometimes people describe it as the flu with the body aches. I’ve had the flu before. This was a totally different feeling. When I say body aches, I mean your body just takes. It was so hard for me to get out of bed. And I knew in that moment that I had it. I started to get a fever that Saturday night, and I called my boss and I let her know right away I was quarantined immediately. The people that I was around, I obviously notified them right away. Luckily, nobody around me got it except me. But it was hard. I mean, after the fever, the body aches. I had trouble breathing. There were nights where I almost thought that Joe See, maybe you’re having a panic attack because I would wake up in the middle of the night gasping for air. I ended up getting an oximeter reader for my finger, and my levels were pretty low. So I ended up going to the hospital and I stayed there for little. They monitored me, and when I came back home, I mean, I think I just realized how lucky I waas that even what I got wasn’t as bad as what some people are experiencing. The biggest long term symptom that I’ve had is just ah, lot of tiredness, like two months after three months after you just felt like you ran a marathon. That’s the best way I can describe. It is you just feel like you ran five miles. I thought that the chest pain that I was having was just residual lung aches, maybe from all of the issues that I had, because I had a lot of coughing trouble breathing on the bright side, being a journalist who got co vid and and got it is bad as I got it again. Other people have had it worse. But I see things differently now, and when I go into my stories and I hear other people’s experiences, I think that I have a lot more compassion for people and a lot more understanding for what they’re going through. In a time when the events taking place across our country can feel quite heavy, it’s moments like this that are worth celebrating on. There are positive stories that we do get to cover, and the most recent one that I covered is spoke of regional hospital released their 1000 Cove, it patient from the I C U, which was a huge step for them. There are big things that happen all the time that this has been something major that’s going in the history books, for sure, and to have spent the last year covering this, Um, it’s something that I’m never going to forget. I know it’s something I’m probably one day going to be sharing with my kids, and it’s been an honor to also be able to help people. What I do every day is try to get all of the accurate information to inform the public. And so during this time it has been so important to be able to do that, and I know it’s something that I will never forget to have been a part of all of it and to help the people in my community

‘I would wake up gasping for air’: Journalist shares her personal COVID-19 story

WPBF’s Jossie Carbonare contracted COVID-19 in the summer of 2020.

Jossie Carbonare, a reporter from Florida news station WPBF, contracted COVID-19 in July 2020. Here she talks about her experience with the virus, both having it and reporting on it for a year, and how that has impacted her as both a journalist and a person.We are living in unprecedented times with COVID-19 spreading across the nation and world, and the stories about how people are coping, battling, and persevering through the pandemic have become more important than ever.In each episode, “Field Notes” brings you a handful of stories about how coronavirus has impacted real people across the United States, and you can hear more about what it’s like to cover the pandemic from the local news teams that are committed to keeping you informed, no matter what.

We are living in unprecedented times with COVID-19 spreading across the nation and world, and the stories about how people are coping, battling, and persevering through the pandemic have become more important than ever.

In each episode, “Field Notes” brings you a handful of stories about how coronavirus has impacted real people across the United States, and you can hear more about what it’s like to cover the pandemic from the local news teams that are committed to keeping you informed, no matter what.