A 911 call. A ‘brain fog.’ Inside the Folsom mayor’s frightening battle with COVID-19

The city of Folsom has been hit hard by the coronavirus in the last month. Among the worst ongoing cases belongs to the mayor.

Sarah Aquino, Folsom’s mayor for the last year, is OK, but not all the way back. She was released from intensive care at a local hospital on Thanksgiving day after five days of treatment, but she does not yet feel normal and wonders when she will again.

“Physically, I’m OK, but I’m in a brain fog,” she said Tuesday, talking on the phone while getting some sun in her backyard during a post-hospital quarantine. “It’s like an out-of-body experience. Like it’s happening to someone else.”

She thinks the fogginess may be from the ongoing steroid treatment. “Tomorrow is the last day of the 10-day steroid treatment. I’m hoping my brain will clear a bit.”

Aquino, 48, chief financial officer for the family insurance business, said she first had symptoms in mid-November. It felt like a flu. She was vomiting and had diarrhea, and couldn’t stay hydrated, so she went to the hospital emergency room.

“I should have spent the night,” she said. Instead, she got re-hydrated and took some anti-nausea medicine and went home. Late the next night, “I told my husband to call 911.”

She found herself in the hospital for five days, this time getting the full gamut of available COVID-19 therapies, including the drug Remdesivir, convalescent plasma from someone who already had the virus and daily doses of steroids. She was on oxygen, but not a ventilator.

The first day in the hospital, she would vomit each time she tried to move, although she had no food in her system. “It was miserable.” Her breathing was fine, but she got congested for a few days.

They let her go home on Thanksgiving day. Her husband and teenage son both have since tested positive and have suffered from mild symptoms, but have not needed treatment. Her 78-year-old mother also has exhibited symptoms, but is doing well.

She wonders where she got the virus and whether she could have done something more to avoid it. “I’ve always known the virus is real,” she said. “I’ve tried to take sensible precautions.”

She has declined invitations to parties in peoples’ homes. At City Hall, she always wears a mask. At work, employees wore masks when clients came in, but otherwise she and coworkers were alone in each of their offices and did not wear masks. “Should we have? Possibly.”

A coworker tested positive for the virus, so Aquino tested and it came out positive too, at about the time she started to have symptoms.

She says she hopes by January that she will feel back to normal, but she has talked with friends who caught the virus in July who still are not healthy.

As a community leader, she says she wants Folsom to support its businesses any way it can, but believes some safety measures are appropriate. “I will tell you, I get frustrated when I get emails from people who think that mask wearing is a joke,” she said.

She says she never felt her life was in jeopardy. “I got great care. It is just the unknown. Not knowing when I am going to be back to normal again.

“I’ll tell you, as soon as I can have that vaccine, I will be in that line.”

This story was originally published December 2, 2020 at 5:00 AM.