After nearly two months, former Lamar superintendent's widow out of isolation

Nearly seven weeks after the death of her husband, Joann Wilson has finally been released from isolation.

Wilson, the widow of former Lamar R-1 Superintendent Dennis Wilson, made the announcement on her Facebook page Friday:

Finally! Finally, I am NEGATIVE! Hallelujah! After 8 weeks of isolation I am off Covid-19 house arrest! 

I called Derek Wilson and told him I was coming to Pittsburg for lunch in the park. So we did! My granddaughter, Gracie, turns 12 on Sunday so I brought her gifts and we had a nice visit! 

Orie and Janie Ensz drove over from Parsons to the Home Depot parking lot for a social distancing visit. It’s nice to see them! And then I drove back home with a smile on my face! Thanks, I needed that!

And next week I’ll work on getting the antibody test and look into donating plasma that I pray might spare others from the nightmare that my kids and I have experienced. I’ll donate all the plasma I can to help make that happen! Bring it on!

After staying two weeks in quarantine following the March 21 death of her husband from COVID-19, Wilson began exhibiting symptoms of the virus but was not able to get tested. When she finally was tested, the test returned positive and began more time in insolation, which she wrote about in an April 21 Facebook post:

A lot of the past month still feels surreal. And yet I feel like I’ve been hit by a ton of bricks! I am in my fifth week of quarantine since his death, not counting the week he was in the hospital.

No one has been in, not my kids, or any other friends or family, and so a lot of things that would normally be done in the first week have not even been started. There has been no funeral, no closure. There have been hundreds of calls, cards, messages of encouragement, for which I am immensely grateful, but no human contact.

You see, shortly after Dennis’ death, in the two weeks of subsequent quarantine, I discovered I had some of the symptoms he had.

I posted about that, and was connected to a sweet, caring young internist at KUMC who thought it very important that I be tested, after I was refused testing by our county health department on three different occasions.

I tested positive, not surprisingly, and over the next two weeks of quarantine, developed more of the symptoms, adding up to all the ones Dennis had except the acute shortness of breath. And because symptoms continued I was tested at the end of that two weeks and again the results were positive.