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Mr Agerton tested positive for the coronavirus in late November after returning from the Red Sea. Because the expedition team followed strict precautions, he assumes he was infected on his way home. With a low fever, mild respiratory symptoms and loss of smell, he isolated himself in a bedroom at home on Bainbridge Island near Seattle for 10 days, protecting Ms Agerton, 46, and their children, ages 5, 11 and 16.
Then, on December 17, a simple spam call on her cell phone triggered a cascade of paranoia related to technology, surveillance and government agents.
“I started having these auditory hallucinations,” he says. He would jump out the window at night, imagining voices outside. Fearing that families looking at their neighborhood Christmas lights would be spying, he would grab the family’s Australian Shepherd, Duke, and go out “to have eyes on people in the car,” he said. declared. Then he would become convinced that the police scanners were broadcasting his dog walk and all the other movements he made.
“I couldn’t control myself,” he said, adding, “I just thought, ‘I’m losing my mind.
After two almost sleepless days keeping it to himself, he confided in his wife, who was stunned. “To have your great person in a crisis going through a crisis was for me just utter helplessness and fear,” she said.
He has asked her to put the family’s phones on airplane mode and is concerned their house will be tapped. He became “anxious out of his skin” about an ambulance siren, said Ms Agerton, who led him to search for him. “Probably every 30 minutes he needed to go around outside and see what was there.”
She took him shopping, thinking that “something as insane as Costco would somehow help it be a normal day,” but said he was concerned the shoppers were undercover agents. “It was really torture for him.
That evening she called a friend, a nurse with experience in mental health.
“You need to get to the emergency room now,” the friend urged, adding, “lock all guns,” Ms Agerton said.
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