VICTORVILLE, Calif. _ She sat in a corner of the hospital room, breathing into a tube designed to prevent pneumonia or the collapse of her lungs.
It was the fourth week of April, and the last two months had been so long and so monotonous that Janice Brown started counting the cars rolling by her window _ just for something to do. The janitor and the nurses had become old acquaintances.
So, it seemed, had the coronavirus.
In the short annals of the Desert Valley Hospital's COVID-19 unit, Brown is a person of some distinction. It's a notoriety that no one would want _ but sometimes in life you don't get to pick what makes you special. Or how.
Brown, 66, was the first patient at Desert Valley to test positive for the coronavirus. One of the first to be released. She thought she was in the clear, spending weeks _ masked but confident _ walking around her sister's home and backyard in Rancho Cucamonga.
Her doctor, Imran Siddiqui, certainly thought he'd seen the last of Janice Brown. Just days after he discharged her on April 3, she told Siddiqui that she was feeling great.
Two weeks after that follow-up call, Siddiqui spotted her name on the patient list. She had tested positive a second time.
The story of Janice Brown, two-time coronavirus patient, parallels the story of the hospital that treated her. Both narratives are built around a hope that the worst is in the past. Or, at the least, not waiting on the horizon.
By the time Siddiqui, medical director of Desert Valley Medical Group, watched Brown leave for the second time, he dared to hope that the COVID-19 unit of the hospital could soon be dismantled.
