A bad year for neighbor Joe
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Wow!! That is sad. Hope he recovers.
George, stay safe and avoid the restaurant downstairs for a while!!
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@taiwan_girl said in A bad year for neighbor Joe:
George, stay safe and avoid the restaurant downstairs for a while!!
Well, they're only open for takeout now, and "outdoor dining" - in February.
So, that's not a concern.
Actually, the last time I ate there was almost two years ago, when I had lunch with @jon-nyc ! If we feel like food from there, I usually just place an order and carry it up to our unit (we are directly above the place).
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After testing positive for COVID-19 on Jan. 4, Joe quarantined for a time and intended on heading down from his downtown home on Jan. 14 to meet with his employees at his business.
“I called the doctor, I stayed home for 10 days and I felt great,” said Joe, 60, who had gotten tested because he was supposed to fly to Florida on Jan. 7 and was feeling a bit under the weather. “I thought, ‘Good, I got this over with.’”
He was a no-show for the meeting. Alex, a kitchen designer for Joe, sent him a text message asking what was up. Although he said he’d been feeling better in recent days, Joe on Jan. 14 felt bad. He tested his oxygen level. Joe says the digital readout showed it was in the 80s. Alex says he responded in a text that it was in the 70s.
Either way, this was trouble.
“I told him, ‘You must go to the hospital,’” Alex said, adding that Joe resisted, joking that he’d be OK. “I said, ‘If you don’t leave right now, we’re calling 911.’”
Meanwhile, on that same day, Joe’s 35-year-old son, had just started a new job.
“The first day at my new job I get a call from him saying he’s going into the hospital for COVID pneumonia,” Matt said. “He says, ‘If there are any difficult decisions, I’m putting you in charge.’”
Joe checked into the hospital on Jan. 14. He did not return home until May 29 from the Rehabilitation Hospital
Joe is still confined to a wheelchair and uses braces to help him deal with the neuropathy he still endures, but he’s finally home after four-and-a-half months in various hospitals.
“Everybody thought I was going to die,” Joe said during a phone interview last week.
They had good reason to think that.By the time he checked into the Hospital, COVID-19 had already badly scarred his lungs and things weren’t getting any better. Within a week, Joe was intubated and on a ventilator. By the end of January, Joe – though he wouldn’t know it until much later – was transferred to University of Chicago Medical Center.
According to Matt, one of the reasons for that move was because that hospital did organ transplants, “and we needed that capability.”
Joe doesn’t remember anything about the weeks he spent at University of Chicago, but they were harrowing for his family and employees.
Prior to being put on a ventilator, Joe placed Darling in charge of the business.
“We had a will written up; he signed the papers while he was in the hospital,” Darling said. “I went into all-panic mode. I was good at doing my job, but I needed someone to run the company. I had to get into QuickBooks, print checks and sales reports. If it wasn’t for my two assistants, I’m sure I would have gone mad.”Carmella took on accounting and payroll, while Lydia, who started at Joe’s business only six months earlier, handled delivery schedules.
“We just figured it out as we were going along, and stressing a lot about [Joe],” she said. “He’s like a second dad.”
The business has hummed along in the interim; the pandemic that almost killed Joe turned out to be a boon for the home improvement sector.
“Thank God my business survived,” Joe said. “I’m very fortunate I have these people working for me.”
The pressure on Matt was enormous. Although he had a family to help him navigate the waters, Matt held power of attorney. He would make the final call on literal life-and-death decisions.
“I didn’t sleep the entire month of February,” he said.
As Joe conditioned worsened at University of Chicago Medical Center, his family was given a deadline to decide whether or not to have surgeons perform a tracheostomy – an invasive procedure that would involve opening up his neck to insert a tube directly into his windpipe to bring air into his lungs.”
“We didn’t know if he would ever be able to breathe without oxygen assistance.”
Matt.There were no guarantees it would work or, if it did, that it wouldn’t be permanent. The family had no idea whether the damage done to Joe’s lungs would impact his mental faculties.
“The trach was risky because we didn’t know the full quality of life he would have,” Matt said. “We were told there were so many unknowns. We didn’t know if he would ever be able to breathe without oxygen assistance.”
But, Joe was not improving on the ventilator and in mid-February, the family made the call to have him undergo the tracheostomy. Doctors also induced paralysis and had Joe lay face down to give his lungs all of the assistance they could.
“They told me he had a 5 percent chance of making it, and then it dwindled,” Matt said. “I mourned his death twice.”
Joe woke up from his induced coma on March 10 in RML Specialty Hospital i. It was after doctors induced paralysis and placed his father facedown that he began to show signs of recovery, according to Matt.
“It’s honestly a miracle,” he said.
After a couple of weeks at RML Hospital, said Matt, his father’s lungs began healing and he was taken off oxygen.
“Once the COVID left his body and the scarring shed from his lungs, he miraculously turned a corner,” Matt said. “It’s like someone woke up from the dead.”
But Joe still had, and has, plenty to overcome. He still doesn’t know the long-term impact of COVID-19 on his body. For now, he’s confined to a wheelchair and wears braces to help strengthen his limbs. He continues to undergo physical therapy and it could be months before he’s walking, he said.
Joe also suffers from neuropathy, numbness in his hands and feet, a holdover from the induced paralysis and the reason for the special braces.
And then there’s the psychological impact of having survived COVID-19 and other life events have transpired in the past 12 months.
Last August, Joe’s wife and business partner, Lynn died. In late January, while he lay unconscious in the hospital, his father, Anthony, died. He learned that in March.
“I have a lot of stuff to process,” Joe said.Last week, Joe was able to put on his own clothes for the first time in months – they don’t fit anymore; he lost 35 pounds in the hospital – and he even ventured downstairs from his condo to the restaurant downstairs, where he was a frequent visitor prior to his bout with COVID-19.
“I’ve been getting a lot of calls and texts from friends saying everyone was praying for me,” Joe said. “Those prayers must have worked. I didn’t realize how many people were praying for me.”
"Now look here, you Baltic gas passer... " - Mik, 6/14/08
The saying, "Lite is just one damn thing after another," is a gross understatement. The damn things overlap.
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So, there's a followup.
I don't think I mentioned that Joe has MS. That could be one of the reasons his COVID was so severe. Anyhow, after he got home, they wanted to do more workup of his multiple sclerosis. Part of the workup involved getting some spinal fluid for assessing protein, antibodies, whatever. Getting a sample, of course, meant a lumbar puncture, a spinal tap.
I happened to run into him in the hall before this, and he asked me what I knew about LPs, and telling me that the last time he had one, it hurt like a sonofabitch. Apparently the guy doing it didn't know what he was doing. I told him that I've done hundreds (literally) of spinal taps and epidurals (same thing, but bigger needle and you go about an eighth of an inch not-as-deep. I explained that it really shouldn't hurt all that much, other than the novocaine in the skin, if you know what you're doing.
He seemed reassured, and I didn't see him for another couple of months.
I saw him earlier this week and asked him how it all went.
Well, the LP wasn't bad at all, he said. However, he got a PDPH (post-dural puncture headache) afterward. This is caused by spinal fluid leaking out of the hole in the sac in which the spinal cord lives (the dura). Usually this happens when the needle used is larger, and the bevel of the needle is oriented to cut, rather than separate the fibers of the dura. In my hands, using a 26 gauge needle, my incidence of PDPH was less than 1%.
A PDPH is a nasty thing - I had one in my 20s after a spinal anesthetic. It hurts right in the middle of your head, and it's caused by the relative lack of spinal fluid supporting the brain and surrounding membranes - the brain sags when you stand up, and it pulls on the membranes causing pain. Same basic idea as a migraine (it's the membranes that hurt in a migraine). PDPH is self-limited, and usually goes away after a week or so. Treatment is fluids, remaining supine as much as possible and analgesics.
If none of that works, you might be advised to get a "blood patch." This is a simple procedure where they draw some blood from your arm, and inject it into the epidural space where the hole is. The blood clots, sealing the hole. Relief is almost immediate and complications are rare.
So, Joe's doc didn't think he needed a patch, because, as I said, these things are self-limited.
But...here's where the bad stuff happened.
I turns out that Joe was on a blood thinner (I think it was Plavix - a drug that interferes with platelet function). So, when his brain sagged, a small blood vessel probably tore, and because of his blood thinner it didn't clot quick enough. So, he continued to bleed into his head, in the space between brain and the meninges (membranes).
On both sides.
So, he had to have emergency brain surgery to drain the hematomas.
He appears OK, and seems to understand what happened, but geez Louise. If it weren't for bad luck....
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WOw! What a tough last 12 months for Joe.
