Thirty days at the hospital, 21 days in the ICU. Suffered a stroke, and hoping to be home next week. What is life like when someone close to you gets COVID-19?
On Lake Night with Henry Lake, we met Becky McIntyre Fluegge of Chanhassen, who's mother Karen McIntyre survived the coronavirus after being on a ventilator for 19 days.
"She was kind of one of the earlier cases, I guess you would say", Fluegge says. "She's 68 years old, a retired teacher's aid. She's been married to my dad Chuck for almost 49 years. Her symptoms started kind of somewhat mild on March 15th but after that they progressed pretty quickly. I had actually called her that Tuesday morning jokingly, just as the, you know, the youngest of three girls. I'm the jokester that says, just checking in on the elderly, making sure everybody is okay because they were at their cabin in Northern Wisconsin and she sounded awful. And I quickly was, you know, asking her what's going on."
From there, McIntyre started to get a fever which went up to 101, and she was so tired she couldn't get out of bed.
By the weekend, McIntyre was having trouble breathing. "I told her, you have to get to Madison and get a COVID test", Fluegge told Henry Lake.
Fluegge's parents live in Sun Prairie area of Wisconsin, just outside Madison.
After Fluegge's father dropped his wife off at the Emergency Room, she was taken into isolation without anyone around, a scary moment for the rest of the family.
"Later we get a call from the doctor saying your wife is very, very, very sick. We are going to intubate her immediately. Then we heard nothing. I finally called the hospital around 4:00p.m the next day. You know, that's a really long time to not have any answers whatsoever and be told that your mom would be put her in a medically induced coma."
One of the most difficult things about treating COVID-19 is the isolation, as Fluegge explained. "This is the longest they've ever spent apart since they were 15. So my dad basically had to go home into quarantine for two weeks. So no going outside, no contact with anybody."
After her father's quarantine, friends and family provided much needed support. "Through this all, we kind of realized that we have an extremely amazing support system in friends and family and community", said Fluegge. "So when his quarantine was up, his friends started to be able to talk to him through a window and share a beer, share a laugh or whatever."
Fluegge's mother, however, was still in the hospital. "We realized very quickly that the situation with my mom was life or death. We kind of lived every couple of days fearing that call that you'd get. I call it the worst 30 day rollercoaster I've ever been on."
Eventually, McIntyre started to recover, and after a month in the hospital and three weeks in ICU, she was released. That time was filled with tension and unknowns. "A few days go by and we'd be told she's stable and then something would happen.One day her fever spiked again and then her blood pressure was really low. And then she'd be stable for a couple of days and then it was her heart stopped for 12 seconds and she had something called mild carditis where she could maybe go into sudden cardiac arrest at any moment. And then it was okay, we consulted cardiology, we're going to put a pacemaker in and that's going to fix her heart issue. And then it was, we can't extubate her, which means take the tube out and take her off the ventilator because she's not strong enough to be able to sit up, keep her head up and cough. So we might have to do a tracheotomy. And then that didn't happen."Fluegge says it was almost a miracle that she made it out.
"And then literally, a miracle happened. Our family was planning on the decision to go forward with having her have a tracheostomy. And in 18 hours after we made that decision, she gained enough strength. On Good Friday, my dad got a call that morning that she'd been successfully extubated and she was breathing on her own."
"She's working super hard at a rehab facility in Madison because she also suffered a mini stroke while she was in the ICU. We're thinking she probably can go home to my dad sometime next week, but you know, it just makes the recovery tougher and longer."
Henry told Fluegge, "Everybody needs an angel", something she was quick to agree with.