A COVID patient recovers, and we all reflect
A COVID patient recovers and we all reflect
To begin to understand the knife- edge of life, the way we’ve changed in the last 12 months of coronavirus and the disorder that COVID- 19 vaccines just might soften, let’s go back one year to see Christine Surel, a lifetime Milford resident and state employee who was then 53.
“I used to work out every single day and run a couple of miles five times a week,” Surel said this past Wednesday. She had no chronic medical conditions, ate “clean” food and most certainly didn’t fit the mold of a grandmother of two.
On Thursday, March 26, the last day her state Department of Children and Families office was open, she left early — sick. “By Saturday morning every system I had was failing.” she said, with a fever that spiked to 105 degrees.
Surel spent five days at Yale New Haven Hospital, where she thought she had a heart attack, was told she had pneumonia. “I was like, ‘ Oh my God I’m going to die alone in this hospital. ... I remember crying.”
The illness didn’t go away. She has endured a hellish year, lost a lot of hair and memory function, and still suffers with fatigue, rashes, what she calls “brain fog,” on- and- off pain, tinitus and occasional panic attacks, like when she took a warm bath to relax — only to have it bring back memories of her fevers.
And yet it’s strangely uplifting to talk with this long- hauler, a sometime foster parent who, with her husband, has four adopted children ages 10 to 28. On Wednesday, she had her first workout since an ill- advised attempt in May.
“It just made me feel like I can beat this thing,” she declared, as she prepared to step out for trivia night at a local brewery. We talked about how her friendships and family life had changed.
“I definitely try to live more in the moment,” Surel said, “trying to spend more time with my kids just doing random things.”
‘ Closer to my friends’
We’ve all pulled back on the number of people we see, mostly not by choice. It’s hard to know how the out- there aspects of our lives, in crowds and social situations, will shake out in the long run.
The vaccine, of course, will shape how we return to normal life. But even before the Pfizer, Moderna, Johnson & Johnson and other inoculations course their way through the global bloodstream, a lot of relationships — intimate, commercial and in- between — have changed in the one year since coronavirus hit the nation, hard in Connecticut in the early wave.
Surel’s experience made that rethinking more intense, but not necessarily more unusual.
“I definitely feel closer to my friends, even the friends that I don’t see that often,” she said. “The outpouring of support that I got when I was sick, I was like, ‘ Wow, I really do have a great city and an incredible network of co- workers and friends.’”
‘ Crisis unifies us’
On reflection, we see examples of that kind of rethinking all over the place.
At Amato’s Toy & Hobby on Main Street in Middletown, owner Diane Gervais didn’t relish the pandemic that kept her physically apart from most of her shopping families. But she, her daughter Caroline and their employees developed FaceTime shopping, “toy store takeout” and offered a lot of phone consultations.
“What last year oddly did was bring us even closer to customers,” Amato said.
I’ve heard that from a few doctors, too, who cite the dramatic rise in telehealth visits and, clearly, their role in a health crisis. “It did bring the patients closer to their doctors,” said Dr. Robert Russo, a Fairfield radiologist who’s executive director of the Connecticut State Medical Society.
“We usually move forward in the relationship between the patients and the physicians over time. I think COVID kind of bumped us, so that we flew forward,” he said.
State Rep. Caroline Simmons,
D- Stamford, sees it, for now at least, in politics at the General Assembly, where in- person sessions remain rare.
“In many ways the relationships between me and other legislators have been strengthened,” Simmons said. “People have kids running around in the background and dogs barking, we’re all sort of in this together.”
As co- chair of the Commerce Committee, Simmons cited bipartisan support for a bill to back businesses run by women and racial minority owners. “In the past I’ve gotten pushback on advocating for that,” she said.
“There seems to be not as much partisanship at least in Commerce and some of my other committees,” said Simmons, whose husband, Art Linares, was a Republican state senator when they married.
“Crisis unifies us in shared mission,” Simmons said, referring to public life, but she added, “I’m sure the politics will certainly come into play as we progress in the session.”
Chaos and dark humor
We’ve been talking about this whole shared- mission concept for a year now and it’s squishy but it also does seem real — along with the equally real friction over who gets the vaccinations and how much longer the travel, dining and events economy must remain shut down.
As with everything else in Coronavirusworld, the winding down of the pandemic as the vaccine reaches more people and as the virus runs its course is anything but predictable and orderly.
Gov. Ned Lamont’s top aides debated among themselves Wednesday and Thursday before announcing sweeping reopening plans. “It’s very difficult to make sense of what’s going on right now with the virus,” Lamont spokesman Max Reiss said.
All of this creates chaos and dark humor. Late night comic Stephen Colbert had fun with the reopening this past week, comparing the 100 percent business return in Texas to “removing all the stop signs from a four- way intersection,” then making fun of cautious public health officials. “Our scientists are starting to sound like parents on a long road trip.”
Stepping out of the fog
Out of the chaos, strife and for many, pain, come moments of uplift, determination, revelation.
Simmons has a 2- year- old toddler and a baby born last August, both of whom are growing up knowing only the postCOVID world. Teddy, the toddler, thinks of the mask as part of normal life. “He’s starting to say these words, like mask and COVID,” she said.
No, he hasn’t said “vaccine” yet.
Normalization is the opposite of what Christine Surel wants to see. She remembers heading to the hospital by ambulance. “We were like the only car on the highway,” she said, and with the crew in full hazmat suits, “I felt like ET.”
At the hospital, she was on oxygen but not a ventilator. They gave her the experimental drug remdisivir and other medications. She recalls little contact with the medical staff and long stretches of hopelessness.
Then one day a nurse approached her bed. “’ I can’t tell you it’s gong to be all right but I’m here,’” she recalls him saying. “He put his hand on my wrist.”
Now almost a year later, the illness not gone, she’s grateful for that moment, grateful she survived, knowing a handful of people who didn’t.
“I’m doing everything I can to make the best of what COVID left me with,” Surel said. “It’s definitely gotten better. I know my Social Security number now.”
Like many grandparents, she said, “I didn’t see my grandchildren for almost six months and then I couldn’t take it anymore and said, ‘ You’ve got to come over.’”
And this week, as the numbers led states to reopen, as normalcy finally appeared on the horizon, she took those strong steps out of the fog with a workout and a night out.
“I want to get back to living. I feel, like everyone else in the world, I’m tired of this.” PRINTED AND DISTRIBUTED BY PRESSREADER
“I was like, ‘ Oh my God I’m going to die alone in this hospital. ... I remember crying.”
Christine Surel of Milford, on her five days last spring at Yale New Haven Hospital suffering from COVID