Chris

“All you thought was it’s a death sentence and I’m living proof it’s not...There are hundreds of us every day coming home.”

WILTON, CONNECTICUT: I was at a conference in San Francisco when they announced the state of emergency. They should have shut it down. On the flight back home on Friday, I felt like a truck hit me. It hurt to carry my laptop bag. I knew at that point, something was off. By Sunday, I had shortness of breath. On Monday the canary in the coal mine popped up: a 102-degree fever. 

I walked right into my doctor's office and asked for a COVID test. But because we had such a bad flu season and no one in Connecticut had it, they treated me like I had the flu. By Wednesday I had pneumonia. I got antibiotics and inhalers. By Friday I was done. I had a whole week of a 102-degree fever, which is rare for an adult to have that long. By then I could barely breathe. I had never felt like that before in my entire life and it was very clear I needed to go to the ER.

My biggest fear was I wouldn't see my boys again and they would grow up without a father. For the first time in my adult life, I was truly scared because of all the unknowns. All I read and saw was bad news about it.  You didn’t hear of people like me who got out and the hundreds who come out day by day. All you thought was that it was a death sentence and I'm living proof it’s not!

When I got to the ER with a mask putting albuterol into my lungs, I still couldn't breathe. They measured my blood oxygen level which dropped to where it looked like it would be liver failure. At that point, I was in acute respiratory failure and I was in their hands. I remember being in the gurney and a guy in a red shirt walking us through the ER. I remember nothing beyond that.

You gotta be first at something. The way I view it is if anybody's going to get it, let it be me because my family and I are fighters. I figured it is what it is. There's nothing I can do about it. I can't go back. So, now we have to treat it. After that, I was knocked out for 10 days.

They promptly rushed my wife out of the hospital. She didn't get a chance to say goodbye to me. They said she needed to quarantine herself because she had been exposed. We have twin babies at home but she couldn't ask anyone to come over to help. So, she was coordinating care for a disease that no one in the state had while taking care of two babies by herself.

They gave me an anti-malarial drug and one that treats AIDS patients. They were going to give me the one that treats Ebola patients, but I started coming out so they held off. But, those three really helped me come out. Now, they're using it for other patients with great efficacy. I'm glad they figured something out that worked and now other people are getting to benefit from it.

My first memory when I woke up out of the coma was my dog.I wanted to see my dog. It took a conversation with my wife to realize I had children and a wife. She emailed pictures of my boys so the intensive care unit printed them out and put the pictures on the wall. So when we talked she said, “Look on the wall,” and there were my kids. Then, I remembered that photoshoot, their birth, and going with them to the NICU. My brain slowly but surely shuffled things back together. So crazy enough, it was my dog, then my kids and my wife.

When you wake up, you can't even hold a glass of water to your mouth and it takes a while. I had to learn how to eat, drink, walk, and talk again. When I tried to stand up for the first time I could only walk three steps and fell back into my wheelchair. The following week I was able to walk across the room with some assistance. Slowly but surely my strength progressed to walk on my own all across the room.

I lost around 25 pounds because for a while I just couldn't eat. And then even when it came back, I didn't know how to eat. I didn't know how to swallow. So at the hospital, Chris made me earn glasses of water.  I had to answer questions and then he would help me chew little biscuits and then I could drink and swallow. He walked me through that process so that I could safely feed myself.  

When I was discharged after I got the double negative test, there were still some short-term memory issues, but I've overcome that now. They did a brain scan because they think that I lost a little bit of oxygen and I may have had some mini-strokes due to the two weeks of 102-degree fever. I was slurring my speech a little bit. I was a little slower to articulate things.

I've been doing little things to try to bring up memories. When I came back I played all my music from the 1960s until now. I tried to remember not only the music but the first time I heard it, the emotion behind it, and if I was with a friend. That kind of recollection helped me walk down memory lane. I was able to walk back from my teenage years all the way up to now with music. That really helped me. Exercises like that that I'm doing for my brain are definitely helping me with my articulation.

I had a goal when I came back on Monday that by Friday I wanted to be able to hold one of my children, be able to walk him back to the crib, put him down, and feel confident to do that. And I did. The other day I felt comfortable holding both of those little tanks. So the strength slowly but surely comes back as you use it. I would say that muscle atrophy was the hardest thing. It's the little tiny muscles that you don't think you have until you either pull it and strain it, or you actually need to engage it. 

Before, I was a workaholic and a little bit out of balance. I’ve realized I can put things in better balance. Number one, I needed to take care of myself. I realized now that health is wealth and my own health matters. I've devised a little routine that I do in my office which takes only 10 minutes. Take care of your health and then you can take care of the family. When I go back to work, I'm going to be more balanced, with some decision-making.

I just want people to have hope. I want the family members who just watched their husband or their son or their grandfather taken away in an ambulance to not think it's a death sentence. I want people to know that people are coming home. There are hundreds of us every day coming home. For those families and for any patients who are in the hospital know it’s not a death sentence, just keep at it, keep doing your PT, make the small progressions everyday. You're going to have a setback. I had a couple of myself. Keep fighting and keep going and making those progressions day by day.

SYMPTOMS: mini-strokes, fever, coma, 

LINGERING SYMPTOMS: short term memory issues