Virus hits close to home for physician
Welland doctor and his wife physician assisting COVID-19 patients
NOTE TO READERS: As the community grapples with the COVID-19 pandemic, there are those who keep other people safe and keep essential services running, including doctors and nurses, grocery store clerks and garbage collectors. These are their stories from the front line of Niagara's battle with the novel coronavirus.
Dr. Pran Kundi’s old friend was so sick he couldn’t even draw enough breath to speak to him.
“It was as though someone had ripped my heart out through the skin of my chest. That’s how terrible I felt. I never had that kind of a feeling,” said Kundi, a family physician who has been treating Niagara residents for most of his almost 50-year career.
About two weeks ago, Kundi’s friend of about 30 years was diagnosed with a community-acquired case of COVID-19.
Working from their Welland medical office, Kundi said he and his wife, Dr. Kusum Kundi, are treating a few other patients who have tested positive for the virus.
But none of those patients were as sick as Kundi’s friend was.
“He was critically ill. … His X-rays just made me feel dizzy,” Kundi said, adding scans of his chest showed bilateral pneumonia in his damaged lungs.
Kundi calculated his friend — whom he did not identify to protect patient confidentiality — had about a 20 per cent chance of dying, regardless of whether he was admitted to hospital or remained at home.
If his condition deteriorated, Kundi said his friend could immediately be brought to hospital and placed on a ventilator.
With no definitive home-based treatment for the virus, Kundi developed one of his own.
“I had to devise my own plan,” he said. “I crossed my fingers and prayed to the Lord that the 50 years of experience he has given me would let me make sane decisions for him.”
Eventually the treatments began to help.
“I had three sleepless nights, but on the fourth day the joy I was feeling was just unbelievable,” Kundi said. “The tide had turned.”
Despite the progress, Kundi said it will take some time before his friend completely recovers.
“He is still not out of the woods,” he said, adding he still experiences shortness of breath climbing the stairs within his home.
Still, it’s a far cry from where he was a few weeks earlier. “He was so weak.”
The phrase “we are all in this together” has been on Kundi’s mind recently.
He said the statement — which has appeared on posters and in the windows of businesses that have closed their doors due to the pandemic in the past few weeks — took on a deeper meaning when the virus hit his friend.
“I didn’t realize how ‘in it together’ we can be, until he was so sick,” he said.
Kundi hopes the experience of dealing with the deadly pandemic will result in some long-term societal changes such as delivering products to waiting customers rather than allowing customers to congregate in busy shopping centres.
Those long-term changes may be necessary, because Kundi fears the world will not see the end of COVID-19 after the current pandemic ends.
“My biggest fear is there is going to be a resurgence within five years,” he said, adding he hopes the grim prediction is wrong.