Can you imagine slow drowning?
If you’ve been intubated for COVID-19, you can. For the mom of a teen who experienced this horror, it’s an image she’ll never be able to shake.
I got a message from a friend of mine asking me to share the story of her daughter’s battle with the coronavirus. “I’m still at the clinical/angry stage,” she said. “I haven’t even begun to process the grief and remorse.”
Our girls are two years apart in age, and, according to the narrative continually pushed by the government, they should be safe. We’re assured that kids don’t get infected much and, when they do, it’s not severe. That premise has most of the nation’s children headed back to school in the fall. But how true is it?
Of the first six people I personally knew to have COVID-19, four are tweens and teens (the youngest aged 12) and a fifth is in her 20’s. (This shouldn’t be that surprising, since it is well-documented that even asymptomatic children can be carriers.) Some were only mildly sick, as expected, and some were very sick, with weeks of recovery time.
This is my friend’s story:
Late last month, my 17-year-old started to get a sore throat. By the next day, she had a low fever and some body aches. I got her tested immediately. Her fever kept spiking and body aches continued as we called the doctor and started to self-quarantine because I was sure she was positive. Her test came back positive, while mine was negative. We followed instructions to have her stay in her room, stay hydrated and wear masks. We were good. We figured she’s a healthy 17-year-old, so she would be fine and it would be like just a really bad flu.
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My friend’s daughter is not unique. Half of the new COVID-19 cases are people under 35. Clusters of cases are being linked to socializing teens, college students, and youth sports teams. Even so, some people take comfort in the notion that it’s really “only” bad for elderly people (as if they’re expendable). The reality is that children who get it are experiencing problems with their hearts, lungs, kidneys, brains, and gastrointestinal organs.
It’s harder to repeat the “it’s not so bad mantra” when it’s your child in the emergency room.
She had aches and pains, and we gave her lots of liquids, and by the 6th day, I thought she was making some improvement. However, she started to get more and more tired, with a sore throat and some pain. I called the doctor again, but nothing warranted going to the hospital. On the seventh day, she said she had a pain in her chest all the way through to her back. I know any pain in the chest is a clear sign something is wrong.
We went directly to the emergency room. She was examined and given an x-ray and was admitted with a large blood clot in her right lung. She had a pulmonary embolism with her lung completely blocked.
As it turns out, like many African-Americans, she was at risk of clotting due to high levels of Lipoprotein (a), a fact which took on greater importance because COVID-19 causes clotting. You’re not alone if you didn’t associate this virus with clotting. Because early reporting suggested the disease was primarily respiratory, many Americans have no idea of its attacks on the vascular system or its neurological impact. With every passing week, we learn more about what we don’t know about COVID-19 and all the ways it can strike.
While most people have heard about intubation, how many would have pictured a 17-year-old girl in this position?
The next morning, she was intubated, but she was totally conscious and communicating. They started multiple IV’s with Rendesovir, Heparin, Fentanyl, antibiotics, and saline.
I watched for days while my daughter tried to keep from drowning. Every 10 minutes or so she asked to have what I called “the plunger,” a tube run down inside of her breathing tube to suck up bloody mucus from the lungs, forcing her to try to cough, which she couldn’t because the tube was in there.
This horror show happened roughly 10 times an hour. For 4 days.
I guess I’m one of the few “lucky” ones, because, since she is under 18, one parent got to be with her all the time. If she were 18, I would never have seen any of this. She’d have been alone.
I think one of the reasons folks don’t understand how terrible this thing can be is no one gets to watch this nightmare happening except the medical personnel. Even talking about it is so difficult that it’s just something you want to put out of your mind.
Right now, many Americans are doing just that: putting the whole thing out of their minds. While businesses re-open, many are making it a civil liberty stance to refuse mask-wearing and social distancing, two of the simplest tasks for decreasing the spread of the disease (and, in turn, of keeping the economy open.)
Unlike in the Great Depression, when people endured serious deprivation, or during World War II, when people around the world accepted rations and blackouts or other limits, too many Americans in this moment are doubling down on the notion that the courtesy of donning a cloth mask or keeping six feet apart counts as “hardship.”
Real hardship is watching your child suffer.
On the 10th day, they tried a procedure that takes about 2 hours to put a tube up from the thigh to the clot and put medicine in the clot. It didn’t work. At all. This was not the way it was supposed to go. Nothing we could do but wait for the body to try and get rid of it. A different doctor got in touch with me a few hours later. They wanted to do a thrombectomy, a more aggressive procedure where they basically roto rooter the clot and then suck it out. I signed permission away, again.
By this point it should be clear to any reader that this is not a story about “the flu.” What my friend’s daughter is battling is new and pernicious, and doctors are still in the learning curve.
Fortunately, trial and error paid off this time.
It worked. They started physical therapy, she stood up once and sat down. The next day she stood up more on her own, took two side steps and sat down. Each day they will get her up more and more.
The next day, they tested her ability to breathe for 2 hours without the oxygen. She did it. On the 13th day, she got the breathing tube out and started working on returning her breath to normal, blowing into a monitor to see how high she could push the ball.
Two weeks from the onset of symptoms, she is finally on the road to recovery. What does “on the road” mean? She leaves ICU today.
Not the hospital. The ICU. It’s a long road.
Scientists are beginning to see evidence that for many survivors the road ahead may include permanent respiratory and neurological damage. The mental health effects from ICU stays are profound enough that there are now online support groups just for COVID-19 survivors, as they navigate the weeks and months that it often takes to recover.
Meanwhile, survivors open Facebook to see posts calling the virus a political agenda. They listen as otherwise goodhearted people selfishly argue that it is not enough to open the economy, that there must also be no limits on how they conduct ourselves out in the world. If old people — ok, and a few kids, too — die as a result, that’s freedom.
It’s easier to feel that way until COVID-19 finds you, no matter how safe your town or county or state has been till now. When it does come to you, it will be too late to wish you had seen it as a public health issue or a humanitarian crisis or even a patriotic matter.
My friend thinks people might feel differently if they could picture what COVID-19 really looks like:
For those of you thinking it’s a good thing to go to restaurants, or you want full beaches and open bars, who listen to politicians on how to arrange desks for your classroom, for those of you going without a mask for any length of time, take this virus seriously.
Slow drowning is not a joke.
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Previously published on “A Parent Is Born”, a Medium publication.
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Photo credit: istockphoto.com