Many in the U.S. have survived COVID-19 ICU stays that have left them with anxiety, PTSD and a host of health issues.
Freddy Fernandez almost wasn’t here, on his couch in his Missouri home, his baby on his lap, gnawing on the pulse oximeter that he uses to check his oxygen levels after a months-long bout with COVID-19.
“There is a human cost that the patient pays for ICU survivorship,” says Dr. Vinaya Sermadevi, who helped care for Freddy throughout his stay at Mercy Hospital St. Louis. “It is almost like going to war and having the aftermath.”Freddy’s memories from those long months come in snatches — moments where he regained consciousness, hooked up to machines to breathe for him, clinging to life. Sometimes he asked for his mother, who died of COVID-19 in September 2020.
Days later, with Freddy coughing and struggling to breathe, Vanessa rushed him to the emergency room at the local community hospital. Freddy, although worried about his family, recalls thinking that “it’s only a little bit." Freddy was lucky, though. For all the talk of ventilator capacity, what was in shortest supply during the Delta surge was something called ECMO, or extracorporeal membrane oxygenation. It is used when a ventilator isn’t enough, pumping blood out of the body, oxygenating it, and then returning it.
Far away from her fiancé, Vanessa logged into video calls with Freddy’s doctors the same day she brought the newborn home. The news wasn’t good - Freddy was suffering from infections and wasn’t recovering well. “I have to split myself into two,” Vanessa remembers deciding. “I knew she needed me, but he also needed me. And so I knew that if I was there with him, there is a chance for him to come home and then we would all be able to be home with her. So I had to take that risk.”Some of the most important keys to recovery in critical care aren’t medical.
“We would just hear such love at the bedside,” she says. “And I feel like there’s only so much you can do in medicine, and then there is the rest.” Dec. 2 was the day he came off the machine, and Vanessa was warned there were no guarantees that it would be a success. All Vanessa could think was “finally.” Freddy had never met his baby. Nor had he seen any of his other children. Their interactions had been limited to Facetime and pictures.
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