By Tammy Ljungblad
The Kansas City Star
KANSAS CITY, Kan. — Karl Tsen and Kristy Sloan’s third date was not supposed to last two weeks.
They had met just two weeks earlier, going on some casual dates, but on the night of their third, around March 17, 2020, Tsen, a senior firefighter paramedic with the Kansas City, Kansas Fire Department, got a call that would change everything.
The assistant chief of Emergency Medical Services was on the line and told Karl, “The patient you transported a while back had passed.” Tsen said he was surprised because normally assistant chiefs don’t call paramedics regarding a patient’s death.
“He seemed to hold back on some information,” Karl, recalled. “He said the hospital had started testing patients for COVID as a practice method, and the patient that passed was the first documented case of COVID in Kansas City. The chief continued, ‘Effective immediately, your entire crew is quarantined.’”
Karl said he thanked the chief for the update and said, “Chief… I’m currently on a date with someone.”
There was a pause. “You’re on a date? And you’ve been with her for a couple hours?”
“Yeah,” said Karl.
“You stay right there.”
The chief was frantically calling the Kansas Department of Health and Environment, Wyandotte County Health Department, and the Leavenworth School District, where Kristy was employed.
Karl recalled that about forty minutes later, the chief called back with bad news. While Wyandotte County didn’t think Kristy, who was an instructional facilitator, needed to quarantine, Leavenworth County disagreed. The chief told him, “The two of you need to quarantine at your house for the next two weeks.”
Karl hung up, turned to Kristy, and broke the news. “So, uh… we’re going to be getting a lot closer for the next two weeks.”
Kristy, now 48, said she was stunned and recalled thinking, “I mean… I like you, but this is a little alarming.”
She called her boss. No one knew what to do. It was early in the pandemic—“building the plane as you’re flying,” as she put it.
The couple was quarantined just days after COVID-19 had been declared a worldwide pandemic by the World Health Organization on March 11, 2020.
The chaos of COVID on the frontlines
For Karl and his fellow paramedics five years ago, the pandemic brought an unprecedented crisis.
“We never thought it would amp up the way it did,” he said. “We ran out of ambulances, we ran out of emergency rooms, we ran out of ICU beds. Hospitals were calling from 200 or 300 miles away just to try to find a hospital bed for patients to be transported to.”
He said the COVID pandemic demanded extraordinary efforts from everyone. He emphasized that EMTs and paramedics ran countless emergency critical patient transports, nurses treated patients in hallway beds due to overcrowding, and maintenance staff even transformed patient rooms into negative pressure rooms to prevent the spread of COVID within the hospital.
Day after day, people worked tirelessly, exceeding all expectations, he recalled. As the healthcare system was overwhelmed, first responders bore the brunt of the crisis, often putting themselves at risk with little time to process the magnitude of what was happening.
That risk caught up to Karl about as early as any could. He now had to stay away from everyone—except Kristy.
Making the best of quarantine
Despite the uncertainty, Karl and Kristy decided to make the best of their quarantine.
“Our health departments were calling us daily, asking us for updates,” said Karl. “Hers were making on-site visits, whereas mine was just calling and saying, ‘Are you still alive?’ I’m like, ‘Yep. Okay, well, we’ll call back tomorrow,’” he recalled.
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Kristy said she was required to monitor her temperature twice a day and talk to the health department on the phone. “It was just a strange time,” she said.
Despite the strangeness of it all, something clicked. “We survived those two weeks, and I thought, if we can do this, we can figure out forever,” said Kristy, who has taken Karl’s last name Tsen.
The couple forged a connection during a pandemic-forced quarantine, and nine months later, they were married. The ceremony was small, just a handful of people on a friend’s farm, because COVID still loomed large.
“We still owe our families a real wedding reception,” said Karl, 45, and now a captain in the department. His mother was stuck in Taiwan, his daughter was deployed overseas. “We owe them a renewal of vows,” he said with a smile.
Looking back, Kristy called it “the best thing that came out of COVID.” Amid so much fear and uncertainty, they found each other.
Every day, Karl thinks that he married well.
“It was a blessing,” she said. “We had each other to lean on.”
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