By Blake Fontenay
I’m a 54-year-old guy who exercises, eats a fairly sensible diet, and has no serious health issues. COVID-19 almost killed me, anyway.
Oh, I know. This doesn’t fit the popular narrative about the disease. Healthy people are only supposed to have “minor” symptoms if they become afflicted. The very old and sick (read: people who were close to death anyway) are the only ones at risk of having serious problems with COVID-19.
You can keep believing that if you want. But I’m here (thanks to the grace of God) to tell you that semi-comforting “it won’t happen to me” line of thinking only holds true until reality intrudes. As it did for my wife and I the week before Thanksgiving.
We both started developing symptoms that Wednesday night. At that point, neither of us really believed we had COVID-19. Our doctor said we had probably picked up a cold that was going around. But out of an abundance of caution, both of us got ourselves tested.
We didn’t get the test results right away. And while we were waiting for the results for the next two days, we were both home from work with symptoms that were unpleasant, but seemed manageable: Aches, fever, loss of appetite, and in my case, a nagging dry cough that wouldn’t go away.
Friday night, I thought that I had made it through the worst of it. I lay awake for hours with a high fever, but when the fever broke, I thought that I was on the road to recovery. Foolish me. My troubles were only beginning.
A few hours later, I was being whisked to the hospital in an ambulance after the crud that had been forming in my throat and lungs had become so thick that I was struggling to breathe. I arrived in the emergency room in bad shape.
They were pumping so much oxygen into my face that it felt like I was going through the “dry” cycle at a car wash. One of the doctors asked if I would consent to being placed on a respirator, if that became necessary. I agreed, although I vowed to myself to avoid that fate if at all possible. Later, other doctors and nurses would tell me that they thought a respirator was almost a foregone conclusion for me.
Also, they re-tested me for COVID-19 at the hospital and confirmed that I was positive. The same day, my wife got the results from our initial test that confirmed she also had the disease.
I spent the next five days isolated in a room in the intensive care unit, under round-the-clock supervision. I endured uncontrollable coughing fits so severe that I was often on the verge of blacking out due to lack of oxygen. My fever frequently spiked at night, at one point reaching 104 degrees, leaving me unable to sleep and my brain racked with delirious, nonsensical thoughts.
For days, I was so weak that I could barely move, but couldn’t bear the thought of eating anything that would help me regain my strength. Even when I wasn’t battling fever, it was often hard to sleep, knowing that there was a chance I might never wake up.
I did receive excellent care at McKee Medical Center in Loveland. The doctors and nurses gave me the drugs that, in their estimation, provided the most effective treatment for a disease that currently has no cure. These included Remdesivir, one of the drugs President Donald Trump received when he had COVID-19. When I asked one of the nurses if Remdesivir was an experimental drug, she replied: “They’re all experimental at this point.”
And, of course, I was poked and prodded a lot. They drew blood from me several times a day, including once at 3:30 every morning. I got regular injections of blood thinner in my stomach. And most of the time I was hooked up to an IV, so I had to call a nurse to unhook me if I needed to get up to go to the bathroom.
The treatments did turn the tide, slowly, and after days of spitting up the mucus that had blocked my airways and gradually reintroducing myself to food, I was well enough to be discharged from the hospital on Thanksgiving night.
Not that I was fully recovered at that point. I was still on oxygen for several more days after I left the hospital and I was so lethargic that even simple household chores required supreme effort to complete.
Although my wife never developed the breathing problems that required me to be hospitalized, she didn’t fare much better. She was bedridden for days, too nauseous to eat and too weak to do much else.
Although my recovery has been slow, I’m extremely grateful to be alive. But I’m also resentful of people who refuse to take proper safety precautions or try to downplay the risk of COVID-19.
I read that one in six people who contract COVID-19 develop the more serious symptoms. So basically, if you catch it, you have about the same odds as someone playing Russian roulette of ending up as sick as I was, or worse.
And if you think wearing a mask cramps your style or inconveniences you, imagine how you’ll feel after a few days in an ICU. That’s about as style cramping as it gets.
On the rare occasions when I go out in public, it drives me crazy to see people wearing face coverings below their noses. I’m tempted to stare at them intently and say, in the creepiest voice I can muster: “Wow, you sure have a nice nose.” I mean, who really thinks their noses are so special that the world can’t be deprived of seeing them for a few months?
And don’t get me started on people who insist on going mask-less. They may see themselves as modern day Paul Reveres, fighting against some imaginary tyrant, but to me, they are all just petulant children. It took all the restraint I had not to go up to a mask-less guy I saw in a laundromat, explain to him that I had just been released from the hospital after battling COVID-19, then breathe deeply into his uncovered face. Even though I was no longer contagious at that point, I would have loved to give him something to think about for a few days.
I am sympathetic, to a point, with small business owners who worry about how COVID-19 restrictions are affecting their livelihoods. After all, I was laid off from my previous job last spring when The Pueblo Chieftain newspaper saw a huge dip in advertising after the pandemic hit.
But as unpleasant and stressful as that experience was, it’s absolutely nothing compared to the helpless feeling that you’re about to suffocate on your own mucus. When the simple act of drawing a breath isn’t a given, it really puts a lot of things in life into perspective.
Blake Fontenay is the Daily Camera’s opinion page editor.
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December 13, 2020 at 06:02AM
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Opinion: Blake Fontenay: COVID-19, a foe you really don’t want to battle - Boulder Daily Camera
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