Death from Covid is a slow, painful affair

Imagine falling asleep one day, only to awaken and learn that weeks have past and you’ve lost a leg. As you struggle to emerge from a medically induced coma, you’re confronted with one hundred and forty thousand dollars of new medical debt. Before you can even learn to navigate without your dominant leg, you’re shocked to hear that you’ve lost your job because with only one leg, you’re no longer suitable for the position. Perhaps it’s like awakening from a dream into a nightmare. While you’re still alive, Covid-19 has robbed you of everything, and since you’re only 35, the full weight of debt collection will be levied for the remainder of your life. Before you can even sit up and survey the surrounding hospital room, you’re notified that in order to be disconnected from the myriad of machines keeping you alive, you’ll need a new heart and a surgery that will add an additional thirty thousand dollars of debt to your tab.

This is the reality for my old college friend Danielle. On November third she arrived at the ER with trouble breathing, only to learn that without intubation she would die. After a quick phone call to her parents, the painful process of being connected to a ventilator began. “Knowing they were doing that to my little girl was hell” her mother would later post on Facebook. “But if they hadn’t, she would have surely died that night.” “It was so painful being on the machine that they had to give her morphine” her mother wrote, as her daughter was teetering near death two states away. Hours after intubation, Danielle suffered a major heart attack. “They inserted a pump to keep her heart working, but that led to a cascade of other issues” Danielle’s mother Kemberlee posted daily, giving family and friends a running record of her daughter’s fight against the virus. Each day seemed progressively worse than the last. Soon fluid was building up all over Danielle’s body, her organs were failing and a blood clot in her leg caused circulation to stop. Eventually, Danielle’s leg required amputation. Doctors were shocked, Danille is a healthy 35 year old woman with no complicated medical history.

“She’s hooked up to so many machines, with the swelling, all of it is too much to bear” her mother wrote, asking anyone who knows Danielle to pray. Her friends set-up a Go Fund Me in hopes of raising something to combat the massive onslaught of medical costs. Before long, Danielle would be on dialysis, antibiotics, and blood transfusions all at once. “There’s so much going on medically, I cannot keep track” her mother wrote, “please keep her in your prayers, she needs a miracle.”

As of today, Danielle may live or she may die. She remains in critical condition, the condition she’s been in for nearly a month after being diagnosed with Covid-19. The disease that millions of Americans think is similar to flu has robbed her of everything. If she wakes, she will wake into a life that months ago seemed entirely impossible.

Danielle is a modern 35 year old. She shares her life via social media, loves to travel, and even has a popular Twitch stream where she plays video games live. It was Twitch fans that kindly raised over fourteen thousand dollars to help with her medical costs.

During the pandemic our nation has been so hyper focused on mortality that we perhaps forgot about those who live. Those who live with the defining scars of a disease we don’t understand and that for many, is frighteningly life altering. Perhaps Covid’s story isn’t about those who die, but those who live, and have to live with the disastrous consequences of a mismanaged pandemic.

“We saw our baby last night, hooked up to machines. It was a horror and something no parent should ever have to see.” That was the last post Danielle’s mother made. What the future holds for this family is as uncertain as our nation’s own future.