After emerging from fog, COVID survivor shares trials in new book
Deion Campbell spent two weeks on a ventilator and 40 days in rehabilitation
HAMPTON — After everything, Deion Campbell still wants to wait before taking the coronavirus vaccine.
The Hampton native spent two weeks in March on a ventilator, plus another 40 days in rehabilitation from the virus that took his breath and nearly his life before causing nerve damage to his arm and issues with his feet.
“I have mixed emotions about this. I want to see if it works,” Campbell, 27, said. “I’m not against it. We don’t know the long-term effects. If all your government officials, people in power take it first (and) lead by example, more people will be willing to take it.”
But Campbell knows all too well what COVID-19 can do — and he has dedicated himself to telling his story to all who will listen.
Eight months after being hospitalized, Campbell and his wife Tyisha Campbell reflected on how the virus crept into their lives, shrouded them with uncertainty and what they did to survive the ordeal, which Campbell captured in his new book called “Ventilator.”
“It’s like an old wound. It hurts,” Tyisha Campbell said. “Just trying to move forward one day at a time.”
Campbell, a photographer, decided to write a book about his experience for a couple of reasons. One, for those who are afraid to talk about it or even admit they had it.
Campbell said there are “looks you get, the people who kind (of ) are like, ‘You had COVID, let me stay away from you. I’m not trying to catch, you know, like, germs.’ ”
Mainly he started writing last summer after reading comments on social media in May that really irked him. Recently home from rehab, he joined Facebook survivor groups. Everywhere he saw memes that poked fun at the virus and comments that questioned its severity, even its existence.
“I didn’t nearly die from a fake virus,” Campbell said. “That’s what seems to be the trend in society today. Everything’s a joke, until it hits home.”
The couple wasn’t laughing back in March as Campbell lay on the bathroom floor.
His wife knew it was time to go to the emergency room.
Campbell had been violently ill for about a week, but to him it felt
like 100 years. He already had gone to two hospitals, twice sent home and did not want to go again.
“I went from having a fever, to not being able to hold down any food. I’m drinking a bottle of water and would vomit, instantly,” Campbell recalled.
Tyisha Campbell tried ice packs on his forehead and back to reduce a 104-degree fever. She tried giving him Pedialyte and soft potatoes. The fever hovered. The food came back up.
Lying on the floor, Campbell remembers hearing an ultimatum — his wife threatened to call an ambulance. He was too weak to resist.
“I know I couldn’t do anything else for him at home,” she said. “I was trying to get him to go back. I was practically begging him to go.”
At Hampton’s Sentara Careplex emergency room, Campbell lay in a haze. He recalls a flurry of activity. He heard someone say, “double pneumonia.” Clutching his cell phone, his first reaction was to call his wife. She was not allowed to stay when she dropped him off.
The prognosis was lousy — doctors told him they would do what they could to save his life.
“COVID frequently causes what looks like pneumonia on both sides of the lungs. Double pneumonia, when patients say that what they’re really referring to is what we call bilateral pneumonia,” says Dr. Robin Olsen, a hospitalist at Sentara who received permission from Campbell to discuss his condition with the Daily Press, via Zoom.
In March, the coronavirus threat mounted nationally, amid the disbelief, denials and unknowns about what exactly the virus was and how to combat it. Around Hampton Roads, localities moved swiftly to close public places following statewide mandates to stay indoors.
Local hospitals set up drive-through coronavirus testing sites. Hospitals, doctors and everyone scrambled as the demands for masks, hand sanitizers and other personal protection gear increased and supplies dwindled.
“The lead hospitalists went in first, because people were afraid. They didn’t know what they were dealing with,” Olsen said. “I’ve been a physician 15 years, and this is the first time I can ever recall having (to) treat something where we didn’t have a blueprint. And that is terrifying.”
Olsen said the hospital team is a tight-knit group and that same camaraderie developed between the doctors and patients — they got to know them well — many who were coming in with similar symptoms to Campbell.
“At the time, we were doing a lot of supportive care, which basically means when patients clearly were not able to maintain their own ability to breathe, we would put them on first, you know, oxygen,” she said. “As they needed more, we put them on a high flow. And then if they need it, we put them on the ventilator.”
Campbell was given a cooling blanket and some patients were treated early on with experimental medications, Olsen said.
Tyisha Campbell said after two days in the hospital, doctors intubated her husband. She needed to hear nightly from the doctors to sleep.
The couple, friends from high school, had barely been married for two years, with an anniversary that came and went while he was hospitalized.
Everyone was under stayat-home orders at this point. Family members called, seemingly in shifts, because she could not have visitors. People left food outside her door, but she still ended up losing 13 pounds in a week, she said. She lost her job for a while too and had to quarantine for 14 days.
With their Yorkie as her only company, her husband’s absence was an adjustment, she said.
“I don’t like staying home by myself,” Tyisha Campbell said. “I wasn’t really worried about (food). I appreciated it. I would eat very little. It got to the point people wanted to be supportive.”
What mattered was Deion.
“The only thing I prayed for was for him to be off the ventilator. We were definitely in prayer for that with God. That’s where hope came from,” she said.
He was very, very sick at one point, but Campbell always had a good attitude throughout and believed he would get better, Olsen said.
“He had a very strong faith. It was never a matter of if. It was always a matter of when,” Olsen said. “Definitely there are parts in his course where I was very concerned for him. And that’s been the case for a lot of patients.”
Virginia has had more than 267,000 cases of coronavirus since the pandemic started, according to recent data from the state.
Campbell would be among those confirmed cases, but the Phoebus High School graduate is not sure where he picked up the virus.
The year started out well. His burgeoning love of photography, nurtured during high school, seemed to be blowing up on his Instagram account, KingLegend757 — which swelled past 10,000 followers. Celebrities were taking note. The couple returned from a trip to Atlanta. He had a podcast and a brand. It was barely February. The Big Jam 2000, a mega concert, came to the Hampton Coliseum that month. Campbell was there taking photos, all through the stands and down in front of the crowds.
“It was probably 1,000, maybe 2,000, 3,000 people there,” he said.
A few weeks later, the fever and nausea started. And then breathing became a chore, labored with the air feeling thick and stifled. Campbell recalls taking a step outside his home to get fresh air and for a moment he seemed fine.
Back inside though, what he described in his book as a “blanket of sickness,” enveloped him.
Campbell went to two medical facilities and had been told various things — an X-ray suggested bronchitis, among them, before being taken in at Sentara.
When he woke up from being on the ventilator, he didn’t realize it was two weeks later.
“We’re seeing a lot of people with ... some neurological slowness, confusion, complication. Not uncommonly, it takes a couple days to clear. In his case, he was not able to walk when he left. And he needed a lot of help.”
Campbell spent nearly six weeks in rehab, relearning how to walk and use his right arm, which had suffered a lot nerve damage. Since coming home, the couple juggles multiple appointments with physical therapists and other specialists.
For now, photography work is on hold because it’s difficult to lift a camera, but Campbell says he has his podcast to keep him busy.
“My arm is progressing,” he said. “Talking to my neurologists, they say it takes about six months at a time just to grow one inch of a nerve back. So, that’s just kind of a timeline representation of how long the recovery process actually is.”