Husband is on the coronavirus front line, so this Davis family focuses on ‘decontamination’
Irina Okhremtchouk drops everything when her husband arrives home from work. She makes sure their preschool son is secluded away and doesn’t come out to greet his father, and then she focuses solely on what she calls “decontamination.”
The couple formulated the routine over one or two days, even detailing what her husband should do with the shoes he wears daily while working as a critical care doctor and caring for patients who have COVID-19.
“He cannot wear hospital shoes into the house, so we got a box for his car where he would wear a pair of shoes out of the house and then have hospital shoes in his trunk, change into those shoes to go to the hospital, come out of the hospital, put the hospital shoes in the back in the cardboard box and then put on the house shoes,” Irina said. “The house shoes are not really coming into the house.”
He wears those shoes to the garage door, she said, and he strips out of his work wear there. She follows behind him as he goes through their Davis home, disinfecting the stairway banister and opening doors so he won’t touch them. Then he showers.
All around the nation, medical personnel developed routines like these over the spring as they tried to keep from passing the highly infectious coronavirus to their families and their community. Irina has been in contact with a couple hundred of these people through the Med Spouses Unite website she created to offer support and resources.
Until early May, she said, she sometimes delivered meals to another doctor who urged his wife to take their children down to Southern California and live with her mother for a while. But they all recently returned.
Irina asked The Sacramento Bee not to use her husband’s name or identify his employer, out of concerns hat he could face retaliation.
“It’s crazy for me how deep these doctors’ fears are about that,” she said. “They’re highly educated, smart people. They are giants, and they clam up.”
An expert on educational administration and policy, Irina works as a professor at San Francisco State University. She serves on the faculty senate there and she’s working from home even as she cares for Avi, the couple’s son, takes sole responsibility for household chores and adheres to her household’s disinfection protocols.
“The way I look at it is: I can’t make a mistake,” she said.
When she read April news reports about the couple in Detroit, both of whom were first responders, losing their 5-year-old daughter to COVID-19, she chose not to tell her husband about how it brought up all her worst fears.
It validated for her, though, all the hard choices that she and her husband made: setting aside the master bedroom for his use alone, restricting him from physical contact with her and their son, keeping Avi from his customary weekend visits with his grandparents in Dixon.
“He could be a silent carrier,” Irina said of her son. “We don’t know.”
Avi recently celebrated his 5th birthday without a hug from Papa, just as Irina had a Mother’s Day without any hugs from her husband.
This story was originally published May 25, 2020 at 5:00 AM.
