Child’s pain, a mother’s fear as Covid-19 takes over family

Fatima Merhi’s son Umar sipped a glass of water and immediately grabbed his throat. It was the moment she knew Covid had infiltrated her home.

The Eaton family at their Yagoona home in western Sydney: Umar, left, Zaynab, Yunus, Fatima Merhi and Marcus Eaton. Picture: Jane Dempster

A week and a half ago Fatima Merhi’s son Umar sipped a glass of water and immediately grabbed his throat.

He had a look of fear on his face she had never seen on the 11-year-old before. “Mum, that really, really burnt,” he said.

It was the moment Fatima knew Covid had infiltrated her home.

The rest of Australia may be talking about road maps, ­picnics and bars opening, but in western and southwest Sydney thousands of families are still enduring the double-whammy of lockdown and sickness.

Of the 1290 latest daily cases in NSW, 72 per cent were in these hotspot health districts, inflicting profound hardship on communities least able to deal with it.

In a sign of the stress being ­experienced by health authorities, Fatima wasn’t told that her son had tested positive until four days after his test – and then only ­because she repeatedly rang to ­request the results.

Now, her husband Marcus Eaton and the rest of the family of five have also tested positive.

It began when middle child Umar woke with a sore throat and fever. Fatima took him to a drive-through Covid testing clinic in ­Yagoona, the southwest Sydney suburb where the family lives.

Earlier that day, Fatima and Marcus had their first dose of the Pfzer vaccine.

Fatima received a negative test result the next day, but Umar’s still hadn’t come through.

By now seven-year-old Yunus, her youngest child, was down with a fever.

Increasingly frustrated, Fatima called the pathology lab again. “It’s been four days now, something’s not right,” she said to the person on the phone.

Then the young mother finally received the response she’d been dreading: “Your son, I’m sorry, he’s come back positive.”

Friend Linda drops off a care package at the front gate for the Eaton family to collect as they isolate. Photo: Jane Dempster

That evening, Fatima’s 14-year-old daughter Zaynab, came down with a fever.

Two days later it hit Fatima herself, with such force she couldn’t get out of bed.

“It was 4am, I’m in the most unbelievable pain … you can’t move your neck,” she says.

“I’m scrambling through the drawer to find some strong painkillers and I was crying at this point. And I’m not a crier, but I’ve never experienced that type of pain in my life. This was on another level. I couldn’t move.”

By Sunday night, Marcus, a software engineer and “the rock” of the family, was also bedridden.

“Once I started developing the fever it was just constant chills,” he says. “I couldn’t get warm, even though I had a high temperature. My body was just killing, muscle aches and pains. I could barely move.”

Fatima counts herself lucky in one respect: friends of the family have been dropping food and other essentials to the front gate.

“We’ve got a lot of Muslim ­associations that Fatima is apart of – she does a lot of volunteer work,” says long-time friend Linda. “If she wasn’t in isolation and she found out others were, she’d be the one doing what I’m doing: deliveries and drop offs, whatever they need.”

Fatima has a large extended family, so isolation – even before Covid hit – has been tough. Her widowed mother has 17 grandchildren. Her brothers live in West Hoxton, and her sister lives in Fairfield. Earlier this year one brother had twin girls.

“I haven’t seen them in months. I can count how many times I’ve seen those little girls. We don’t visit each other,” she says.

As for her own children, they’ve bounced back quickly. For them, it’s more of the same boredom inflicted by life under lockdown. They even look forward to the daily visits from NSW Police alongside members of the Australian Defence Force conducting compliance and welfare checks.

“There’s only so much you can isolate a little kid,” Fatima says. “They’re already feeling the pressures of being at home.”

Fatima is home-schooling all the children.

“Umar is in Year 6. He’s not going to enjoy his last year at primary school. His school camp has been cancelled, school formal is going to be off for him,” she says.

This year the family has been able to visit a mosque only a ­couple of times to pray. “We’ve been doing what we can religiously from home,” Fatima says. “We do our normal daily prayer routines, we pray five times a day at home. The kids all get up and pray with their dad.”

The entire family has received calls from nurses from Westmead Childrens Hospital every few days, and NSW Health nurses, checking on their welfare. Fatima describes the support she’s ­received from nurses as a “beautiful experience”.

“Incredible, honestly, incredible. They’re just so caring. To hear that reassurance that the kids can bounce back into normal straightaway, it does, it does reassure you,” she says.

Fatima does not have an issue with the lockdowns, despite the cost to her family and her community.

“If it means keeping everyone safe and trying to get the numbers down, then it’s not just my family in lockdown, we’re all in it together,” she says.

“At the end of the day it’s not a personal thing, we’re all having to deal with this as a community, as an entire country actually.”