Heavy darkness had settled over Milwaukee when McKenna Klein—who always introduced herself as Kenna—pulled onto highway I-84, west-bound towards home, with her life hastily dumped into plastic bins and haphazardly scattered in the trunk and back seat of her 2009 Toyota Camry. Klein hated driving at night—she hated driving, period, and would often postpone her bi-weekly pilgrimage to the city if any type of precipitation was forecasted. Yet she pushed ninety miles-per-hour, nearly twenty over the speed limit, during a night where the bite of autumn, smelling of smoke and stinging like rubbing alcohol, hung in the air. Earthquakes of disbelief shook her body as she tried to wrap her head around how a simple nose swab that morning had unraveled her plans.

Her adrenaline, the wide-eyed manic energy that told her to pack her Baby Yoda stuffed animal but not her thermos of half-drunk coffee, began to fade halfway through her hour-and-a-half drive to Fall River. Fall River is a small village of less than 2,000 people caught between Beaver Dam and Sun Prairie. As the Day-Glo red and yellow of car headlights streaked by, an eerie stillness settled over her. She found herself laughing, a sound that hollowed out her insides with a dull blade of irony. Her laughter was drowned out by sobs as tears began to burn her eyes, and Klein pulled over on the side of the highway, unable to see the faded asphalt illuminated by the watery light of her headlights mere feet in front of her.

God, I don’t know how sick I’m gonna be, she thought as she stared out the car window. What if I can’t breathe? What if I die? What if I have more regrets than accomplishments?

Since the beginning of the Fall 2020 semester, which was the week of August 3, 1,585 people have self-reported or tested positive for COVID-19 at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee’s testing facilities. The facilities are spread across three campuses—Milwaukee, Waukesha County, and Washington County. People ages 20-29 have made up 18.7% of Wisconsin’s COVID cases, the largest percentage of any age group as of April 8, 2021, according to the Wisconsin Department of Health Services. 46.1% of UW-Milwaukee’s 24,725 students fall into the 20-29 age bracket.

Klein’s life during the pandemic was a well-choreographed, two-step dance: taking online classes in her two-bedroom apartment in Milwaukee and living with her parents while working as a waitress at a restaurant in Columbus, a ten-minute drive away from Fall River. She had done everything right: social distanced, limited outings, sanitized surfaces on a regular basis, and called her grandfather instead of visiting. Klein thought she was safe.

Klein tested positive for COVID-19 the morning of October 28, 2020.

She was tested at 10 a.m., labeled as presumptively positive and tested again by 1 p.m., and told to quarantine by University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee’s Norris Health Center by 3 p.m. The hours between her call with Norris and departure from her room in Kenilworth Square Apartments, one of UWM’s residence halls, had been a blur of rushed packing, near breakdowns as she scoured her apartment for her phone, which had gotten thrown in one of the plastic bins during the chaos.

Of course I got COVID, Klein, whose checkered past of extended hospital visits and upset stomachs left her jaded, thought after she received her diagnosis. A self-proclaimed germophobe, Klein had quickly made wearing baby blue, medical-grade face masks as much a part of her daily routine as curling her dyed silver-blonde locks and applying her bronze eyeshadow.

Days away from hosting a Halloween party for a small group of friends she hadn’t seen since the beginning of quarantine, Klein’s diagnosis squashed any hopes of having socially distanced fun.

Like Klein, Brianna Schubert found her first two months of the Fall 2020 semester thrown off course when she contracted COVID-19 in mid-September.

“I would literally put a pumpkin spice candle in front of me, and it smelled like air,” Schubert said, remembering her initial denial of the diagnosis. “My roommates had me spray hairspray and bleach. I couldn’t smell anything—that’s how I knew.”

Schubert is a planner, her life laid out in color-coded rectangles of time on Google Calendars that she proudly pulled out at a moment’s notice to fact check her statements. Lost in a dense fog of illness, her head feeling as if it were floating and disconnected from the rest of her body, Schubert lost track of the days after her COVID-19 test came back positive. Her time and focus were dictated by headaches not unlike particularly nasty hangovers and fatigue that weighed down her body. A candle-enthusiast and adventurous foodie, it was Schubert’s sudden and lasting loss of smell that knocked her off-balance, and over six months later, the way she registers scents is not the same.

“I’m grieving the loss because I love smelling things,” Schubert said, frowning as a shadow of disappointment fell across her typically sunny oval face and bright eyes. “The literal worst thing that I can’t smell is my boyfriend [of nearly six years]. I know that’s super like cliche or cheesy, but, you know like people have pheromones. When you give someone a hug, you want to be able to smell them, especially your boyfriend.”

She spent the month following her diagnosis quarantined in the house she rents with her three roommates in Milwaukee, itching to regain her freedom and wishing for the support of her parents—who live in East Troy, Wisconsin—and her boyfriend, who was also quarantining in the UW-Whitewater dorms. Despite having her roommates in the house, Schubert was isolated from the rest of the group, being the only one to test positive, in the sense that she had to suffer through her symptoms alone.

Like Schubert, Klein quarantined alone, unable to seek comfort in a strong human connection while her body struggled against the virus.

Klein spent two months isolated in her parents’ basement, trapped between a squat, beige room, a bathroom, a bedroom her younger brother, Jared, slept in during high school, and two sets of sliding doors. Her only connection with the outside world was when Finn, her Shih Tzu mix, wandered down the stairs and scratched at the glass door partitioned off the main room, his pointed teeth on his lower jaw jutting out like a pout as he stared at Klein sprawled out on the tan couch.

Klein’s parents, dressed up in makeshift hazmat suits—an armor of taped together trash bags, nuclear-yellow rubber gloves and face shields—to deliver her food. It could barely count as human interaction, though, because she was rarely awake as focusing on anything too long made the spot behind her eyes throb, bogged down by the COVID-fog. Shivering under bulky, flannel blankets, Klein, when she could hold her eyelids open for long enough, would stare out the sliding door that led into her small yet plush backyard, hoping to remember what the rest of the world looked like.

The social isolation Klein and Schubert, along with college students all over the country, experienced due to the COVID-19 pandemic has tested the boundaries of their mental and physical health. According to a study by the National Library of Medicine – National Institutes of Health, 91% nationally reported worrying about their own health and of their loved ones and 82% had increased concerns on academic performance. 

Both Klein and Schubert journaled during their quarantine to cope with their situation. Klein reflected on her regrets and plans for the future as well as her mortality and legacy. Taking a different approach, Schubert recorded what her day-to-day life was like.

A study conducted by Boston University found that post-secondary education institutions are important places where mental illness prevention and treatment are highly effective, for “the traditional college years of life coinciding with the age of onset for lifetime mental illnesses.”  Klein said that the mental scars of the virus, the fear of being sick again and of loneliness, are harder to recover from than the physical symptoms. Improvement in mental and emotional support programs could greatly help improve the lives of over 22 million young adults like Klein who are currently enrolled in universities and colleges.

UW-Milwaukee’s Dean of Students Adam Jussel approached the Fall 2021 with the goal to support students’ entire well-being as best as he could. With slicked-back hair and a broad face, Jussel is the master of a business-casual posture.

“We try to check in to see if there’s anything students need and then connect those students to the resources, and primary resource for mental health on this campus is University Counseling Services,” Jussel said, using his full face as he talked. Eyebrows jumped up from their hiding place behind his dark, square glasses frames to punctuate sentences, and his mouth shifted side-to-side, condensing and stretching the creases that formed at the corners, as he thought.

Therapy via Norris Health Center was shifted to a virtual setting, instead of being located in the sprawling, cherry-red brick maze of the Northwest Quad building, to give all students access to mental health support during the pandemic. The counseling services will remain available online during the Fall 2021 semester as students adjust to being back on campus.

A survey from the American Council on Education found that the top two priorities of 61% of college and university presidents were the mental health of students and the emotional well-being of faculty and staff.  Jussel is among the university administrators nationally who believe supporting student’s emotional well-being is an essential part of his job.

“From a resource perspective, we are thinking critically about how we promote counseling, our group workshops and counseling,” he added, clasping and unclasping his hands in front of him. “There’s some challenges as to mental health challenges and traumas associated with the pandemic that I think we won’t know the full picture of until, years after this.”

Schubert said that maintaining her mental health was her top priority, both this academic year and looking forward to the fall.

UW-Milwaukee joins the growing list of American universities planning on returning to primarily in-person instruction during Fall 2021, holding approximately 80% of their classes in the classroom, due to climbing vaccination rates and some students becoming restless with online learning. A return to campus for most students is imminent, but Jussel does not expect that it will feel the same as before the pandemic as lingering anxiety and doubts mingle with the excitement of the student body.

“We’re going to work with our kind of orientation folks, our campus programmers, to try to incorporate some element of what I’m calling healing into these programs,” Jussel explains. He later clarified that his use of the “buzzword” healing simply meant that he planned to continue supporting the way UW-Milwaukee was now. “We’ve heard from a lot of students that it’s really scary to come back to campus it’s, there’s a lot of feelings associated with that.”

Klein wanted to pick up where she left off in Milwaukee during fall 2021; however, she is committed to remaining safe and socially distanced even after getting sick. She is uncertain what the fall will look like—if things will look as “normal” as advertised—but is ready to feel like a college student again.

Until she can return to campus, Klein had a more immediate dream she wanted to realize: getting her vaccine.

Sunlight seeped through mottled clouds typical of a Midwestern April, remaining ambiguous as if it was still sweater weather or the beginning of t-shirt and shorts season. Klein’s baby blue Camry pulled out of the driveway of her home in Fall River where she had been living permanently since January. The car was empty except for a few fast-food wrappers crumpled underneath the passenger seat and a pine-scented air freshener hanging like the remnants of an old, forgotten forest. The backseat was empty, clear of any suitcases or plastic bins crammed with personal affects. A mixture of K-pop and Harry Styles music served as the soundtrack for the triumphant journey.

Six months after her original COVID diagnosis, she was on her way to Columbus Hospital to get the first dose of the Pfizer vaccine after being on three waiting lists and having one re-infection scare from working in a restaurant where, more often than not, patrons entered without masks. Still fifteen pounds underweight and unable to enjoy the scent of peppermint tea, her favorite, the way she used to, Klein had hope for the future for the first time since the pandemic started over a year before.