Bonus Content from ROADS TAKEN’s recent interview with Lara Fowler, water resource management expert, mediator, and educator. Hear how she and her family navigated an adventure living abroad at the start of the coronavirus pandemic and how they continue to live with the unanticipated souvenir of long covid symptoms on this special covid-19 Bonus Episode of ROADS TAKEN.
Recently, ROADS TAKEN sat down to talk with Lara Fowler about her tendency to become and remain curious about things, leading her to a wide variety of interests and ultimately into a career in water resource management.When the coronavirus pandemic hit, she had to wind down a year living in Sweden with her family and navigate her husband’s long covid symptoms on two continents. Join Leslie Jennings Rowley as she talks to Lara about this for a special covid-19 Bonus Episode of ROADS TAKEN.
For more on Lara's adventures in Sweden with husband Chris (Dartmouth '97) and their two kids, check out their blog, https://skoldpaddan.csfowler.com, including posts on the covid situation.
Executive Producer/Host: Leslie Jennings Rowley
Music: Clancy Rowley on a theme by Worth Rowley
Find more episodes at https://roadstakenshow.com
Email the show at RoadsTakenShow@gmail.com
Leslie Jennings Rowley: Hi, this is Leslie Jennings Rowley. Recently, I sat down to talk with Lara Fowler on Roads Taken about her tendency to become and remain curious about things, leading her to a wide variety of interests and ultimately into a career in water resource management. Join me as I talk to Lara about how she and her family navigated winding down a year living in Sweden, just as the coronavirus pandemic was ramping up in Europe and how her husband’s long covid was the souvenir they never wanted. …on this special Covid-19 bonus episode of Roads Taken.
I do need to ask this because I had heard that you were in Sweden. And then the pandemic happened and I heard she's still in Sweden. So what was life like before? And actually why Sweden, first of all, and then kind of what was life like then? And then the, after.
Lara Fowler: So Chris and I had a decision point where we realized that he was about to get tenure. We hoped he would get tenure and we had an opportunity to, for him to be on sabbatical, to take a leave. And we started to discuss like where in the world could we go that would be interesting for our kids—late elementary school, middle school at the time—would be good for both of. And I had had the privilege of going to the Stockholm International Water Institute's World Water Week a couple times and a great group of people working on water issues. So it was like, you know, Sweden might actually be a really good place for me. And for him. The Swedes actually have the equivalent of our social security number. They have a person number. Basically a number that's attached to you, but they use it for everything. So while we were there with our person numbers, you know, you go buy a headlamp in the store and they would use the person number for the warranty information. The number is used for everything. And so what you can do in the U.S. with our census every 10 years, you can ask questions, but you have to interpretate a lot of the data in between. In Sweden you can just ask, you know, what's the outcome of the student who does what later in life and what's their medical history, right? You can see all of that if you are there and working with that data. So he had colleagues at Stockholm University who were willing to bring him into projects, working with some of that very, very detailed demographic information. I was partnered with Uppsala University, a little bit north of Stockholm in their Peace and Conflict Research department. They have a water conflict program. So I was working there and really curious to sort of step out of the legal world and into sort of peace building diplomacy world and see what that looked like. So we were there, our kids were in at an international school. We tried to get them enrolled in Swedish school, but we didn't have the person number yet, so it was impossible to do. But we were there and, you know, had a chance to kind of hit a reset. It was an interesting experience, right? I am fixed term faculty. I wasn't entitled to leave, but managed to negotiate, particularly since I got a Fulbright to be able to go do this work, but I was also still working with the U.S. So part of the early parts of it were actually fairly dislocating because I was working a lot remotely. So I was in the world of zoom before everybody else was in the world. So in some ways later, because a lot of my job is engagement, I had already made the shift to the online world while we were there.
I got to go to the Netherlands and go to a conference on water. I'm meeting a lot of the folks across Europe, working in these issues; ot to go to Denmark and talk with people about water quality. So we just both dove into the deep end and work was to think really enriching. It was a chance to hit a reset to experience different country.
We were skiing in the French Alps the week you shouldn't have been skiing in the French Alps. We were staying with our friends, Annie and Colter. They were actually touring in Europe that year with their two kids. And we were skiing in the valley up from Chamonix and watching, COVID start to just break across Europe. And near the end of that week, there was about a meter of snow that came down. We had some great skiing, but Chris was like, I feel like I have something in my lungs. And so, you know, we just figured maybe he had gotten some powder in his lungs, but then we were, you know, do we drive back from France. Do we fly back, right? And so we came back into a changed world. That was in late February, early March by March 17t—my Fulbright was a six month Fulbright ended in February, but worldwide, all the peace Corps volunteers and all the Fulbrights were ordered home.
Chris had, by that point gone to a doctor and they were like, well, we think you have bronchitis and you were in France. You weren't in Italy. We're not gonna test you for COVID. We were like either he has COVID or we're gonna get it. So if we had tried to leave in that early March period, that mid-March period, we priced tickets to fly from Paris, often Stockholm to Paris, back to the U.S. were $6,000 per ticket, $8,000 per ticket. It's gonna cost us $32,000 to get home. And we're like, Okay, who can tell us where, what we have to do? And we were like, Penn State, are you okay if we stay here? And Penn State folks were like, you're fine. Our families were like, you're fine. Just stay.
So Chris, during early March didn't feel great. I had a period where I didn't feel great, like my bones just ached. But we couldn't get tested for anything. And, you know, our kids were schooling remotely from Sweden, but every day we were: do we go, do we stay? Our house in the U.S. was rented to a Spanish family who'd locked themselves down well before the COVID kind of really…cuz Spain got hit pretty hard early on. So even if we came back to the U.S., we didn't have a place to go. We were renting an apartment from one of my former law students who was in Australia with her boyfriend. And they were staying put and hunkered down. So there was this whole game of chess of who's where.
March rolls on Chris starts to feel better. He goes for a couple runs and his system just tanks, right? Like, you know, easy run and he fell apart for a while. Feels better early April, are they, you know, he runs over with my son to go get a birthday cake for my son on April 8th and he falls apart again. So by this point, somewhere in April, they've announced that they're going to end the remote schooling for the kids in Sweden at their international school, very old building tight hallways. And they're going to introduce extra hand sanitation at the doorway, nothing about ventilation. And it was very clear that ventilation, and by this point it was also very clear that Sweden was taking its very own approach and that approach was really, really different. So at that point, I mean, we were starting to feel uncomfortable. Like something is happening more with Chris's health. We've gotta go. So we were making plans to go home, you know, and this is right around the time when they were, they were starting to realize that people were walking around with low oxygen levels, but not knowing it. I was like, fine. I can fix this. I can get an oximeter and I can just test his oxygen levels. And it's not a big deal. Go to all the pharmacies around. No, they don't sell it. The only place you can get it is the hospital.
So I finally drag him to the hospital. You know, he's not feeling great. Take him to the hospital on Friday. They make him do like 80 air squats and they're like, look, you're fine. Your resting heart rate is fine and your oxygen levels are fine. But he didn't feel good. That Saturday, we wake up to the news that his a hundred year old grandmother had passed away. We were kind of sad. We go for a hike in the woods. He still doesn't feel great. He goes to bed and I wake up in the middle of the night to him hitting the floor, just absolute smash in the bathroom. And I come in to find blood everywhere. And he is like, I think I had a stroke. He's like half of my face is numb. Half of my arms and legs are numb. You need to call the hospital now.
I had just navigated this the day before, but you know, calling—See if I can say this without tears, right?—Calling the hospital, calling the ambulance to have somebody come in a foreign country, hoping your Swedish pronunciation is good enough to get them to your neighborhood and then waiting for an ambulance at three in the morning, having, you know, sending your 14 year old out to wait for the ambulance in the middle of COVID. And having my 11 year old sit with their dad. And I'd also realized that once somebody goes into the hospital during COVID times, you can't touch them, you can't get them, you can't reach them. So I'm like scrambling around to put together a cell phone charger, his cell phone, a t-shirt, you know, shoes, socks. I don't even remember what I put in that bag, but it took them forever to get ready cuz COVID to prep and come in and then wheel him out in an ambulance. And I was like, I don't know if I'm gonna see you again. So he spent 40 hours in the emergency room where upon they ruled out: He didn't break his neck in the fall. He didn't seem to have had a major stroke. He might have had a minor stroke. We still don't know. We were supposed to leave May 2nd. I'm like talking with our friend, Jamie, who's an emergency room doc, another Dartmouth person. She was like, you know, you're gonna need to get clearance to fly with a brain injury. So they were like, you gotta stay for an extra week and get another CT scan. He finally came home, but his nervous system was just basically super, super tanked. So we eventually came back on May 9th in amongst a lot of challenges traveling. Flying on a flight, easy to get plane tickets at that point. But one of the guys on the flight had a schizophrenic breakdown, right? Like, and had to be detained on a flight with like 20 people on it. So stuff like that was just thing after thing, after thing where we're like, we cannot make up how seriously challenging this is.
So he's effectively got long haul COVID issues, two years later, still with his neurological system, still really struggling. He got a handle on it last summer, finally, and felt much better. And then as he taught again this year, sort of the pressure and stress really took his system apart. So, I mean, I think that's the other thing I would say is we've navigated all of this in the midst now of quite a bit of adversity and a really close look at what happens when you're like, it's not that big a deal. So we also then came back. We left Sweden in the height of their outbreak and came back actually to far more fear in the United States, but very low levels here in the United States. And so part of it was like the whiplash of coming from a country that wasn't taking it very seriously, but had real issues to a place that was taking it seriously, but just didn't have that much COVID at the time. Waves of COVID have now come through were like on our fourth wave of COVID. And so it's been interesting to navigate that space both personally, but more globally at a time when we're trying to also raise now teenagers and kind of just navigate work life and all of the other things.
For a long time, we were able to, to deal with things by just living day to day. Right? What, what do I need to do today to get through this day? And I think it's, it's made much more of an immediacy. I'm much more willing to say, yeah, I've got more work to do, but it's 10 o'clock and I can't deal with it. I'm going to bed. And trying to reprioritize, I think health and sanity a little bit more. Our frustrations with it, finally, I mean, we were, we were pretty public with the struggles we had to the point of even going to our local paper and being like, we're talking with a lot of people who've never met anybody with COVID. Let us share our story. And it's not a great story, right? You know, here's two young and Chris was in the best shape of his life. He and our son, Steven did a, a race with 15,000 of their closest Swedish friends, rght? You know, big race. And they were, he was really fast. He was super fit. And so part of it is just, wow. Okay. This is what this is like to actually deal with a long term health issue. And so it's, it's taken reworking our relationship. It's taken reworking kind of our expectations for what's normal, what our energy levels are and to really say, well, what do we value? I'm actually gonna prioritize seeing family and seeing friends and taking the downtime that's necessary. What does that look like? Not quite sure, but it's been an eye opening and very direct experience. It's certainly changed our worldview. It's changed how we navigate in this space. It's changed how we navigate within the university, but we've found, I think, ways to kind of handle it. And again, to come back to what makes us resilient both as a community, as a family in that broader setting. So it's been a, quite a learning experience.
LJR: That was a special bonus episode of roads taken each Monday. We post another full length interview episode with a classmate of mine as we walk down the road to our 25th college reunion. Join us on the journey by subscribing or following wherever you access your favorite podcasts, or check us out at RoadsTakenShow.com. Thanks so much for listening.