Donnelly glad to be home after virus fight
Lake Mary offensive coordinator was in the ICU with COVID battle
After some scary moments and 12 days in the hospital with COVID-19, Lake Mary assistant football coach Adam Donnelly finally returned home Monday to a welcome greeting from his wife and two children.
“I feel much better now. I have done really well, I guess, in the recovery portion of it,” Donnelly said. “Once I got out of the ICU, they were able to work down my oxygen levels faster than what they thought and were able to get some good lung function back.
“Being at home and not having tubes in your nose makes things a lot easier, and I’m trying to do some walking and getting back to normal.”
Donnelly, the offensive coordinator/running backs coach for Lake Mary, was hospitalized with complications from the COVID19 virus a little more than two weeks ago. He was moved to the intensive care unit Feb. 21, and hospital personnel watched him more closely. Fortunately, Donnelly said, his levels began to stabilize and there was no need for him to be intubated, a stage of desperation for most COVID-19 patients.
“When I was in ICU, they were talking about whether to intubate me or not; I knew that was a bad sign,” Donnelly said. “I was
concerned, but you can’t do much. You’re trying to listen to what they say and breathe in the oxygen they’re trying to push into your body, but you don’t have a lot of control, so that makes it more scary.”
Donnelly, who was diagnosed Feb. 11, said his symptoms included fever, chills, body aches and headache, but eight days after the diagnosis, his oxygen level read 90 on an oximeter. Persons who test positive for COVID-19 are told to go to the hospital when oxygen levels dip to 90 or below. He entered the hospital Feb. 17.
“I thought I was doing all right controlling it at home with some Tylenol and ibuprofen. When you get it, they just tell you to go to the hospital if it gets worse, but it’s not really clear what worse means,” Donnelly said. “My wife and mother, together, kind of realized I was having some shortness of breath one day, which was a new symptom for me . ... They had me use a pulse oximeter to test my oxygen level and it was, I think, 90-88, somewhere in that range, and that’s when you are supposed to go to the hospital because that’s not good.
“That’s when I went to the ER ... and they told me I had, essentially, COVID pneumonia. Most of my time at the hospital was really the fighting off that. They gave me remdesivir at first and some other medicines and those did a good job of knocking those symptoms out.”
When his symptoms had originally started to deteriorate, it was somewhat of a shock for the 38-year-old Donnelly.
“I had assumed that if I got COVID, I would be OK because my immune system does so well, but this ... it hurt me bad,” Donnelly said. “We had a couple of players, brothers, whose father died during the season, so I thought about that in there and that made it really scary.”
He was in the ICU for five days before returning to a regular patient room at the AdventHealth Altamonte Springs COVID ward.
“In the ICU, they had to do a bunch of drawing blood to see if enough oxygen was getting put into the bloodstream,” he said.
“At first it wasn’t great, but over time it got better, and with a lot of respiratory treatments and things like that, things started turning around.”
Lake Mary football coach Scott Perry also contracted COVID, as did Donnelly’s wife, Jessica, who received the antibody treatment, and it worked well for her. Also coming down with COVID was his 8-year-old daughter, Olivia, who has been asymptomatic, and Donnelly’s brother. The Donnellys’ 5-year-old son Landon did not contract the disease.
“I’m very happy to be home, to be back to my kids and my family,” Donnelly said. “There were certainly moments in there where I was not 100% sure what was going to take place. When they were talking about whether to intubated me, like I said, that was the scariest moment for me.
“I definitely feel fortunate they didn’t have to put me on a ventilator. They had to put me on massive amounts of oxygen, but they didn’t have to make a machine breathe for me, so I definitely felt fortunate I was able to get in and that the doctors were confident with the actions they were taking.
“They knew when I needed to go to the ICU, and I obviously didn’t want to, but they knew when I needed to be watched more closely. I thought, ‘Just give me some more time here,’ but obviously they knew that it was more serious than I could understand. They had a plan and executed that plan and it went well.”