Doc had to be patient
S.I. hosp resident has new perspective after coma drama
Dr. Haadi Shuaib was used to being on the other side of the stethoscope. So, when doctors told him he couldn’t breathe because his lungs were failing and that he was going to be intubated, he drifted off, frightened that he might never wake up again.
Nine days passed before Shuaib, a medical resident at Staten Island University Hospital, awakened from the coma that doctors had induced. He was surrounded by family and friends, with a new perspective on bedside manner, and on-thejob training.
Shuaib, 30, was reunited on Wednesday with the doctors who saved his life. At a news conference, he reflected on the challenges of being the one in the hospital gown.
“I was always the physician,” Shuaib said. “Seeing it from the other side was a profoundly humbling experience.”
March 18, 2022, began as a normal day for Shuaib, who started his 12-hour shift doing hospital rounds. The Omicron variant of the COVID-19 virus was spreading rapidly, and Shuaib was as busy as he had been during the height of the pandemic.
During the day, his throat became sore and he experienced some fatigue, which, under the circumstances, didn’t especially alarm him. But when the blurry vision and laryngitis struck, he began to get a little worried.
His symptoms got worse. By the time he made it to the emergency room, Shuaib had trouble breathing and walking.
His condition turned out to be not COVID, but strep pneumonia and toxic shock syndrome.
“It took a lot of convincing from my resident program director and co-residents that I needed to be ventilated,” Shuaib said. “At this point, I allowed my colleagues to take over and take care of me.”
But putting Shuaib — who hiked and lifted weights for fun — on a ventilator was not enough. The hospital’s cardiothoracic surgeon, Frank Rosell, placed Shuaib on an extracorporeal membrane oxygenation machine (ECMO), a device that takes over the functions of the heart and/ or lungs outside the body and is the most aggressive form of life support.
“As you can imagine, he has the heart of an Olympic athlete,” Rosell said. “So, there was no need to do replacement functions of the heart itself, so it was simply the replacement for lung function.”
But first, Rosell had to get past Shuaib’s worried colleagues.
“I had expected, obviously, to come past a line of teary-eyed and anxious family members,” Rosell said. “Instead, I came past a line of teary-eyed medical residents who were well informed that one of their colleagues was in trouble.”
But even with the high-tech heart and lung machine, there were no guarantees, so relatives made their way to New York, including Shuaib’s mother, who traveled from Canada.
Meanwhile, Shuaib was moved to Long Island Jewish Medical Center in New Hyde Park, which has an acute lung injury unit.
“It was different, it was a colleague,” said Mangala Narasimhan, the director of the unit. “We were very concerned because he was so healthy prior to getting sick.
After nine days in the coma, Shuaib was weaned off the machines that had kept him alive, and he was discharged three days later.
Shuaib did some respiratory rehabilitation work at home, and within a month he had his lab coat and clipboard, and was seeing patients again.
“I found, after all that happened, a level of comfort, a sense of security with my health intact,” Shuaib said. “It was more inspiration after what I went through. I was back in action”