Sonny Sultani launched his digital marketing startup in February. In March, he caught the coronavirus.
The Evanston-based entrepreneur was just weeks into starting his company, 120/80, when he began developing shortness of breath and a dry cough. He went to the urgent care twice in March, neither time qualifying for a COVID-19 test given that he was an otherwise healthy 40 year old and hadn't traveled internationally.
"A week later my fever started, and that's when all hell broke loose," Sultani said.
Sultani's fever lasted for seven straight days. He lost his sense of smell, experienced extreme chest tightness and difficulty breathing, felt completely fatigued and his cough worsened. He went to take a nap one Sunday, and didn't wake up until the following day.
"It didn’t feel like a flu, I'll tell you that much," he said.
Sultani finally got diagnosed with coronavirus on April 2, but by then he was already largely quarantined from his wife and two sons, who are five and two years old. Sultani spent a total of six weeks alone in his bedroom, where he could barely muster the energy to watch TV. For meals, his wife would knock on the door and leave a tray of food on the floor outside the bedroom, all while wearing gloves and washing the dishes as soon as Sultani was finished.
"Isolation is hard because you’re sick and you really want to have people around you, but you can’t," Sultani said. "When it was the height of the illness, I didn't have enough energy to do anything. I couldn’t eat, I couldn’t watch TV. There was a good four-day stretch where I did absolutely nothing."
While Sultani was dealing with the worst illness of his life, he still worked to keep his fledgling business afloat. His digital marketing company landed a handful clients in its first month of operation, and Sultani continued to jump on calls and respond to emails during the early weeks of his condition.
"I was still trying to work, but not very successfully," he said. "Getting on calls, you could hear me coughing. I had clients tell me, 'Are you ok? That sounds really bad.'"
Once the official diagnosis came in, he paused operations, writing an email to clients that he was COVID-19 positive and could no longer work.
"When you start a business, you want make sure every client is happy," he said. "That makes or breaks a business—those first set of clients you have. Then I had to disappear on them. I felt so guilty. Even though I shouldn't—I couldn’t control the sickness. But I felt so bad to just abandon my clients that way."
Sultani said he offered customers an out, telling them he understood if they needed to look elsewhere for digital marketing services. To his surprise, nearly all of his roughly half dozen clients stayed on and continued paying him while he was ill.
As now more than 70,000 Americans have died from the coronavirus, Sultani's story is one of the lucky ones. Today, Sultani's health has improved and he's no longer quarantined from his family. And his small marketing upstart has 11 paying customers, five of which he landed in the last two weeks. He's added on a second employee, and plans to have a third join later this month.
Sultani said he feels fortunate to be back on his feet, and admits he feels frustrated by those who downplay the seriousness of the virus by protesting in swarms, refusing to wear a mask or thinking COVID-19 is "just the flu."
"The flu feels like a breeze compared to this; it was way worse," he said. "Nothing rivals this."
