When Haley Griffis got her first dose of COVID-19 vaccine, she cried in relief.
Griffis, a 36-year-old stay at home mother of three, is one of the 5,129 McLennan County residents who have been fully vaccinated against the COVID-19 virus. She was diagnosed with heart failure in late 2019. She said in the pandemic’s early days, when she and the public were still learning about the virus, doctors, friends, and the news media would send her constant reminders of one fact: People with heart conditions like her are more at risk for serious illness or death.
“I have been terrified, or some level of terrified, for a year at this point,” Griffis said. “Really, March 12 and 13 was when the news articles started popping up everywhere. You couldn’t avoid reading about or hearing about coronavirus, it was just everywhere.”
Griffis' heart issues began with symptoms like exhaustion, rapid weight gain and loss, rapid breathing, low blood pressure and a pounding heart in September 2019, but the healthy 35-year-old chalked the symptoms up to anxiety until they began to worsen.
In November 2019, a doctor told her to see a cardiologist after emergency surgery on her gall bladder, then called the next morning to tell her the heart wasn’t his area of expertise, but something was clearly wrong. In between doctor’s visits, she was rushed to the emergency room and spent a week at Ascension Providence Waco, where she was diagnosed with heart failure. After more tests, doctors settled on viral cardiomyopathy, heart failure caused by a virus after the illness has passed.
“The most logical explanation is that, at some point in time, I caught a virus,” Griffis said. “It could have been the common cold. For whatever reason, my body couldn’t fight and it wound up making its way and settling into my heart, and doing damage because my heart couldn’t fight that damage and function at a normal level.”
Even an illness like the flu is dangerous to someone with heart failure, and could end in Haley needing a heart transplant. After months of being careful, the Griffis family spent spring break of 2020 in Colorado.
Haley said she remembers hearing about the virus’ progression through other countries but she and her family were mostly concerned with the possible impact of the altitude on her heart.
“Basically, my heart functions at lower efficiency and capacity than other people’s, even much older people’s,” Griffis said.
After the 14-hour drive home her mother-in-law Marlene Griffis was the first in the family to test positive, followed by Haley's husband, Jud, and eventually one of her daughters. At the time doctors were still rationing what tests they had for the virus, and her 41-year-old husband’s symptoms weren’t considered enough justification for a test until his mother received her diagnosis.
“Your body can’t take an infection of any sort," Griffis said. “We were sufficiently scared into taking the words of doctors and scientists very, very seriously."
Jud quarantined nearby at his mother’s house while Griffis stayed at home with her 7-year-old twin girls, Jo Jo and Caroline, and her 6-year-old son, Rhett.
Haley checked on her husband and mother-in-law daily through a closed glass door and checked her children’s’ temperatures every morning and night, which is how she caught Caroline’s low-grade fever, the only COVID-19 symptom Caroline ever developed.
“I gave her Tylenol once and her fever never came back, it was so mild,” Haley said. “I never would have known, under normal circumstances.”
Her doctor told her he didn’t even want Haley to drive Caroline to the testing facility. With her family sick, her parents living in another city and travel restricted, she wore a mask and drove to Ascension Providence’s Lakeshore location.
“When you pair that with the still fairly new discovery of a life-altering heart condition … It was such a weird feeling, knowing I was in one of those categories early on and knowing I had been exposed,” Griffis said.
Haley and her other two kids tested negative, but Caroline joined her dad and grandmother in quarantine.
“I couldn’t be there at all for them,” Griffis said. “I was in shock, so much shock.”
Griffis said the multiple doctors she met throughout her medical ordeal, as well as other friends who happen to be doctors, called to check on her constantly. They were concerned for her and anxious to learn more about the virus.
She said her family maintained the same heightened level of isolation they did in March for months afterward and still don’t take many chances.
“Our experience ended in everyone surviving, but it was miserable,” Griffis said. “It was scary.”
She said while most of her friends and family have been understanding, she knows people who’ve been outspoken about wanting to end the statewide mask mandate.
“Wearing a mask is really a pretty minor inconvenience if it could potentially keep someone from having to go through what my husband and mother-in-law went through," Griffis said.
Griffis received the first dose of the COVID-19 vaccine in January and the second in February from an Ascension Providence vaccination clinic.
"I think this past year has been so traumatic for everyone," Griffis said. "It's had such an effect on people's livelihoods, people are losing loved ones or aren't able to see loved ones... and it was just this huge relief."
Griffis said after receiving the vaccine she vowed to her heart transplant surgeon that she would continue to wear her mask in public to keep herself as safe as possible.
"I feel like my peers... it's sometimes hard for them to wrap their heads around why it's such a big deal to me," Griffis said. "But I can usually remind them pretty easily."
Griffis is grateful her children's school district will still require them when Gov. Greg Abbott's decision to end Texas' mask mandate takes effect on Wednesday.
She said she's especially worried about the threat to herself and others posed by COVID-19 variants that spread more easily that previous strains.
"The governor made his decision and made his announcement, because he's allowed to do that, because he's a politician and that's his role," Griffis said. "But that's not his expertise. We have so many fabulous epidemiologists right here in Waco who've devoted their lives to studying the spread of infectious diseases. I just don't understand how we're not listening to them, first and foremost."