We asked our Facebook readers to volunteer to have some “super-honest conversations” about how their lives have been altered in the past year. The story below is part of the second installment of a three-week series.

When COVID came to Indiana, Bandy Russell and family left on a road trip.

“We went to Arkansas to pick up a horse. What does that say?” she said, about her level of concern at the time.

“Scared” wasn’t the right word for how she was feeling. She doesn’t know what the right word would be. But she remembers the eerie feeling of seeing so many packed Walmart parking lots along the way, like it was Black Friday every day.

Her now-17-year-old daughter, Bailey, was concerned. She thought they might get arrested for being on the roads. Mom, 43, assured her that no state wanted to keep them; they probably wanted them out as soon as possible.

On their way back from picking up this colt, they’d planned to stop at a crystal mine to dig some rocks, another of the family’s hobbies. But everything was closed for deep cleaning.

“It was a little hair-raising at that time,” Bandy said, not knowing for sure what they’d find open and closed, like gas stations.

“Everything was changing.”

Bandy’s mother, Sandy Fields, had tried to talk them out of going — “she was scared, or whatever,” — but they needed to get this horse. Bandy was going to train him for summer shows.

It was hard to know what information was trustworthy.

“Even today the information just seems to be ever-changing and there’s so much distrust in what you hear,” she said. “And then you accumulate information into what makes sense and then you just try to do the best you can with it.”

A couple days after returning from their spring break trip, Bandy, Brent, Bailey and Waylon were home for the long haul.

Bandy’s employer, Indiana University, had sent everyone home to work remotely.

Brent’s employer, a company that installs flooring in apartments, briefly called off jobs.

Brown County High School closed, first for a couple weeks, then for the rest of the school year. Both kids would be learning online instead, which was “a real struggle.”

For one, they didn’t have reliable internet, until the district was able to get them hooked up to fiber through a grant.

Then, there was the challenge of adjusting to that form of learning. Bailey excelled academically in an in-person school setting. “The online environment is not her best way of learning,” Bandy said. In addition to the chronic pain she’s been dealing with for a couple years, she’s now experiencing headaches, but can’t get in to see a neurologist for another couple months.

Then, in the fall, a friend from work caught COVID and had to go on a ventilator for 21 days.

Around that time, COVID also hit Bandy’s mother, Sandy.

Sandy had been having heart problems all summer, but she was tough and stubborn. She kept working, running her Brown County Dragway like nothing could get her. In August, they finally got her to go to a doctor who sent her to the hospital for six days. Her heart was in a-fib, not in proper rhythm.

Sandy didn’t have a primary care physician, a regular doctor who helped direct and keep track of her care. Bandy believes that would have made all the difference for her.

With COVID restrictions, Bandy couldn’t always go sit with her mother and keep track of what was happening. That became even more important as Sandy began racking up more problems and doctor visits. She was hospitalized five times and visited the emergency room at least three times in about seven months.

In October, her hospital stay was for COVID. She got it for her birthday, she told fellow race fans on her Brown County Dragway Facebook page. She was at St. Francis for six days and received plasma from people with COVID-19 antibodies, five shots of Remdesivir and high doses of antibiotics.

Sandy pledged to doctors that with her “second chance,” she was going to tell everybody how important it was to wear a mask. And she did.

“I tell you what, and plaster it out there if you’re going to put my name to anything: Wear the masks. Stop the macho (expletive). I made some poor choices,” she told The Democrat in November.

“It’s real. It wasn’t political. It never was. It’s real. Everybody needs to deal with it as a very real, serious disease. It’s invisible. It’s silent. You don’t see it coming.”

Bandy later learned that during one of her mother’s earlier hospital visits, she was told she needed to get ahold of her primary doctor to schedule a colonosopy, her first in 30 years. But she didn’t have a primary care doctor, so she didn’t do it.

By the time they found she had colon cancer — which wasn’t confirmed until December or January — it was too late for treatment. By then, doctors suspected she had possibly two or three other types of cancer as well.

COVID had made her body too weak to fight.

Bandy also believes that her mom’s earlier COVID diagnosis had made it too easy for her cancer symptoms to be written off as COVID effects. The virus was what they focused on, not on what else could be wrong.

Her advocate was Bandy. And it was a lot to shoulder.

“I mean, it’s one of those things. Sometimes, you’ve just got to deal with things you’re handed and hope that it’s not more than what you can do. I don’t know how it feels to go about it. My brother, he’s like, he told me he wasn’t built to nurture and take care of others in need. Oh. Great excuse. Thanks for telling me why you won’t help. So, you know, making those decisions on when to take her to the hospital, I’m telling you what, that’s some of the hardest things you go through. … Not knowing if it’s the right thing to do is extremely worrisome and stressful.”

She was thankful that her job went remote, though it was initially harder to do that way. She was able to care for her mom during the day and log in at other times to get her work done, and without that forced flexibility, she wouldn’t have been able to be there for Sandy as much. It also helped to have tasks that she could check off and accomplish so she didn’t have to think about the things she couldn’t control.

Working with that new horse helped, too.

Once she posted the news that her mom had COVID, a friend expressed so much concern about an upcoming horse trip they were taking that Bandy decided to pull out altogether.

“I don’t know how to explain the feeling,” she said, “but it’s like now you are shunned because you’ve been around somebody — not that you have it, but you were around somebody — who had COVID. … I didn’t deal with it very good because I canceled the trip. … I didn’t want to feel uncomfortable around people or worry or make them worry about how close to me they are or anything like that. … I got outcasted because I was around somebody who just happened to have it, even though I tested negative.”

“For a long time, it was like nobody you knew was actually impacted, and it just didn’t feel — like, which story should I really believe, because I don’t know anyone directly?

“And then it started out with some distant family in Tennessee that had their bouts with it, and then, here, close to home, and it seemed like more and more people you talked to, there were more conversations about people having it. And it makes you really thankful you’re not sick. Or did we already have it in January or February (2020), because we had a real bout with stuff that was weird, or not? We don’t know.”

After she was released from her COVID hospital stay in October, Sandy had 24-7 care at her home. Bandy and a neighbor, Kay Mack, did day shifts and Carl Fritz would come over in the evenings.

Sandy was “like a walking computer with memory,” always remembering everything about people. COVID changed that.

“She couldn’t remember things. Like, if she wanted to say ‘pencil,’ she could be looking at it, staring at it. She could struggle with simple things, and she beat herself up over it.”

Bandy found stories online about COVID “brain fog” and shared them with her mom so she wouldn’t feel like she was alone in that way.

On Feb. 21, Sandy passed away, at home where she wanted to be. She was 70.

They’d found cancer in her colon, liver, and possibly her scalp and esophagus, and questionable lesions in her spine.

“Going off the last visit, my mom knew. And she just broke down. … And that’s the second time, the first time in person, for me to ever see my mom break down like that in her whole life.

“I was able to get her home and abide by her wishes. We done the best by her that we could.”

“Now we’re trying to figure out how in the world to run a business, run that track. That’s all my mom did. And we all have our own jobs, and then both my brother and I have kids and different interests, and we don’t want to lose those aspects of our lives that we enjoy, because my mom would race every Sunday, and that’s all that she did. There’s things she missed out on in our lives because she put the track first, and we want to avoid that, to a point, and still put on a good program for those who enjoy going.”

Bandy doesn’t know what she’s looking forward to once life returns to some semblance of normal. For her, it won’t be for some time.

She’s just going to keep at it, like Mom would have done.

“If you’re around her for an hour, you’ll never forget her — just as honest as the day is long. You might not like her answers, but they’ll be true to her, and a handshake is just as good as a pen on paper. That integrity I hope to carry on.”