A SURVIVOR’S STORY
A Kingston man is home after being hospitalized for nearly three months, but his recovery continues
KINGSTON, N.Y. » Three months ago, Richard Neuner was the picture of health. Active and fit, he enjoyed traveling with his partner Cathy Ellis, hiking and deep-sea fishing.
Now, Neuner says he has to sleep with oxygen and it takes all he has to simply ascend a flight of stairs.
Still, the 73-year-old Kingston man said, he is one of the lucky ones who beat the odds and survived a life-and-death battle with COVID-19.
“I’m out of the woods, but not totally back to normal here,” Neuner said during a recent interview. “It’s been a tough ride, but I’m glad to be home and I’m glad to be alive.”
Neuner believes he contracted the coronavirus on March 21, during the six-hour flight home from Puerto Vallarta, Mexico, to Newark, N.J., where he had been vacationing with Ellis and another couple.
“The guy behind me, I swear he was sick,” Neuner recalled. “He was all red in the face sneezing and coughing, and I swear that’s where I got it.
“I’m almost positive because he coughed all the way back,” he said.
Two days after returning home, Neuner said he developed a bit of a cough that continued to worsen as the days went on.
By the beginning of April, Neuner began running a fever that at times made him delirious.
On April 3, Neuner said Ellis called an ambulance to his home, but the ambulance personnel refused to transport him, saying his fever wasn’t high enough. The next day, he said, Ellis and another friend called again and insisted that he be taken to the hospital.
“They took me out of the house and, by the time I got to the driveway, I must have passed out because I don’t remember anything until April 9,” Nuener said. “I don’t recall the trip to the ER or being put on the ventilator. All I remember is somebody waking me up and saying, ‘It looks like you’re going to make it. You’re going to make it.’”
Neuner was on a ventilator at HealthAlliance of the Hudson Valley’s Mary’s Avenue campus in Kingston for five days.
But coming off the ventilator wasn’t the end of his ordeal. In fact, it was nowhere near it.
Neuner remained in the intensive care unit until April 23. During that time, he said, he had an “AFib (atrial fibrilation) event and developed a blood clot in his arm.”
Eventually, he was moved out of intensive care and into a regular room. In May, he was transferred to the Ellenville Hospital swing bed program, the hospital’s transitional care unit.
There, he said, hospital personnel worked with him to help him learn the most basic of functions — how to sit up, how to stand, how to walk.
“After being in the ICU for that period of time and fighting off the virus, I didn’t even have the strength to sit up in bed,” Neuner said. “The people in the Ellenville swing unit, they did wonders to get me walking and back on my feet.
“The Kingston ICU, they saved my life. The Ellenville swing unit they got me halfway back to being myself again,” he added.
Neuner was released from the hospital on June 29, 87 days after being admitted. He spent his 73rd birthday there. And Easter. And Memorial Day. He lost 30 pounds battling the coronavirus and ended up with a fistula — an abormal connection between two body parts — that required surgery and forces him to continue to wear a wound vac.
Home now, Neuner is now waging a battle against the lingering effects of the virus, which as of July 9, had infected 1,872 Ulster County residents and claimed the lives of 88.
He still relies on oxygen if he has to climb stairs or walk very far and he sleeps with oxygen at night. He is on a variety of medications as a result of the damage the virus caused to his heart and other organs.
“I was very active, Neuner said. I had no underlying conditions at all. I can’t do much of anything right now, I can’t even cut my own grass.
“It shot me out of the sky,” he said.
But, he added, he knows how fortunate he is to have beat the virus that has claimed so many.
“I have lots of friends and they all prayed,” he said.
For local coverage related to the coronavirus, go to bit. ly/DFCOVID19.