Survivor feared: One more coughing fit and it’ll be the end

More than a few times, Jimmy Cannizzaro thought his next coughing fit would be his last.

For several terrifying days, he got worse and worse, as his wife, Jenna Esposito-Cannizzaro paced, alone, in their Park Slope apartment, under quarantine.

“I was at a low point where I thought one more coughing fit and I was done. I wasn’t gonna make it,” he told the Daily News.

Cannizzaro — a mainstay in the New York City comedy scene who works security at the Gotham Comedy Club and was once married to standup comic Lisa Lampanelli — started feeling run down on March 7, and had a small cough.

A few days later, when he had a lingering fever of 99.4 degrees, he started worrying he had coronavirus.

He struggled to catch his breath March 13 when he went to a CityMD walk-in clinic. “I’m telling you right now, you’re going to have the coronavirus. I can tell,” the doctor there said.

She sent him to the emergency room — where doctors released him hours later.

Two days after that, he returned worse for wear with a 102-degree fever. An emergency room doctor spirited him away to an isolation unit at New York-Presbyterian Hospital Brooklyn Methodist as his wife watched.

“It was just nerve-wracking and it was horrible,” Jenna Esposito-Cannizzaro recounted. “The last time I saw him was when he went into triage in the emergency room. I didn’t even get a chance to give him a kiss.”

For the next three days, doctors treated Cannizzaro with antibiotics — until a coronavirus test came back positive. That’s when his doctors switched him to the drug hydroxychloroquine, which Cannizzaro believes made the difference.

Hydroxychloroquine is usually used to treat lupus. The Food and Drug Administration has authorized its use to treat COVID-19 — though regulators in Europe are limiting the drug’s clinical trials.

Cannizzaro’s temperature remained at 102, while his blood oxygen level hovered around 89%. Normal blood oxygen levels measure between 95% and 100%. Once the number hits the low 90s, it’s time to worry.

“And then the coughing happened,” he said. “You coughed so much that you couldn’t catch your breath. I was already weak. I already couldn’t even keep my eyes open, and now I’m coughing and I can’t breathe.

“It’s like the walls were closing in on me. Every coughing fit I had, I almost passed out.”

Doctors disposed of their protective gear each time they visited his room.

Tragedy struck in the room next door to Cannizzaro on the night of March 18. There a 67-year-old man who recently had a heart attack was being treated for coronavirus. “I could hear them yelling at that guy, ‘Breathe! Breathe!’”

The man died, Cannizzaro said.

He felt better the next night. “There was something different,” he said. “I felt like my breathing was better. I felt like the coughing had subsided a little bit.”

His oxygen levels were creeping back up the morning of March 20 — and so were his spirits.

Esposito-Cannizzaro regularly updated her husband’s condition on Facebook, as hundreds of friends and relatives offered prayers and love. “She’s great, Man. She’s my rock,” he said.

Cannizzarro described his experience in his own Facebook post. He returned home Tuesday.

“Everybody was great,” he said of the doctors and staff at Brooklyn Methodist. “They were all with me, when I thought I was going to die ... and I knew they were flying blind.”