FAYETTE COUNTY, WV (WOAY) – Fayette County State Delegate and ER Doctor Margaret Staggers is now out of quarantine after battling COVID-19 for nearly two weeks.
She says she is feeling much better and just a little tired after she began developing symptoms on August 9.
Her symptoms progressively got worse by the day as she says she was very sick for seven straight days losing seven pounds.
Staggers says her worst symptom were the body aches and pains, but she considers herself lucky for never having to go to the hospital.
Staggers documented her daily experience on Facebook.
“The only reason I made this public is because there’s still people who believe that this isn’t real. This is a really real dangerous, ugly bug,” she said.
Staggers says she will rest for now and get her strength back before returning to work at Beckley ARH.
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Original Story:
FAYETTE COUNTY, WV (WOAY) – She is a state delegate representing Fayette County and she is an emergency room doctor at Beckley ARH, and now Margaret Staggers has gone public with her COVID-19 diagnosis and is sharing her condition.
As an ER doctor, Dr. Margaret Staggers has been on the frontlines of the COVID-19 pandemic, but now she’s fighting the virus personally as she first developed a strange cough on Sunday.
“Then I started hurting all over,” she said. “Chills and sweats, and I was supposed to work Tuesday.”
She called Beckley ARH CEO Rocco Massey, and he was able to get her a rapid test on Monday, which came back positive.
Tuesday would have been her first day back at work in weeks, and as an avid mask and glove wearer, she was scratching her head wondering how she got it.
“I was at a clinic on Friday that made me take the gloves off because they said they were dirty and I thought well, ‘I just put them on,’” Staggers said. “But that’s the only in exposure I got.”
Now she’s home checking in with the health department daily.
She says right now her symptoms are chills, sweats, loss of appetite, weight loss, nausea, diarrhea, fatigue and cough but can still taste and smell and has a good oxygen level.
Because of her weird initial symptoms, she said if it wasn’t a pandemic she probably would have pushed through and gone to work which is why she in encouraging anyone who feels just a little off to be proactive.
“The quote ‘asymptomatic people’ are probably having strange symptoms like, ‘I wonder why I don’t feel like eating. Why am I nauseated? Why do I have this strange cough?’”
Now she continues to urge the public to stay vigilant and listen to health experts.
She says even though her symptoms are controllable right now, she calls it “misery” and as a doctor knows it can get much worse.
“Of course I work and see the people who have it, but I see the ones who are so desperately ill, not the ones who are hurting all over and walking around miserable like me, but you don’t want to end up on a ventilator and end up dying, smothering to death,” she said.
