Physician has own struggle as patient
Dr. Matthew Harris sat in the parking lot of Children’s Hospital Colorado in the early hours of March 11 before an overnight shift with a fever, chills, dry cough, aches and trouble breathing.
It can’t be happening to me,
Harris thought, totally unaware he would soon fear death.
Harris, 38, is the pediatric emergency medical attending physician at Children’s in Aurora, and a supervising emergency room doctor. He is a husband and father of 5-year-old twins. He eats well, exercises and easily manages his mild asthma. He had not used a sick day in two years.
But in the early stages of the pandemic, with fewer than 100 confirmed cases of COVID-19 in Colorado, Harris couldn’t risk anything. He called his supervisor — Look, I’m sure it’s nothing, I just don’t feel great — checked into Children’s as a patient, self-administered tests for a variety of flu illnesses and drove home. The tests all came back negative. “I started to get nervous,” he said. He awoke the next morning with a 102.7-degree temperature, waited nearly three hours at a drive-thru coronavirus testing site, and an additional three days to get a result. He experienced fatigue, sleeping 18 hours a day. He still refused to believe he had it.
I’m not immunocompromised. The virus just got here. I’m not its target demographic.
The moment Harris got his results, his wife, Dr. Hillary Yaffe, was drawing blood from a patient at Uchealth in Aurora. Her cellphone kept ringing.
“I couldn’t answer it, so I asked the nurse to pull it out of my back pocket,” Yaffe said. “It was my husband, and she said that I needed to call him back urgently. I got blood out of the patient as quickly as I could, and when I picked up my phone, there was a text.”
Nine words that made her heart sink: You have to come home now. I’m COVID-19 positive.
After his positive COVID-19 diagnosis, he immediately self-quarantined at his Denver home. Harris managed family life at a safe distance for three days, but his health worsened by the hour.
The morning of March 18, Harris woke up with what he called “extreme heaviness” in his chest, unlike anything he’d ever felt. He required immediate hospitalization. His mind wandered. Will I ever come home again?
“That was one of the hardest moments in all of this,” Harris said. “I hadn’t hugged my kids in days. I really just wanted to go in and kiss them on the head. I just could not bring myself to do it. … It brought me to tears on the drive to the hospital.”
Harris and Yaffe’s twins — Benjamin and Ayelet — neared their sixth birthday in May with unimaginable circumstances. How do you explain a global pandemic, and a father’s life-threatening illness, to your children?
Yaffe self-isolated with the twins when Harris was admitted into the COVID-19 ward. She struggled to answer innocent questions:
Why can’t he give us a hug? When is he coming home?
For a while, the twins thought dad was just working or getting medicine: Is the doctor’s office ever going to close?
Harris’ slide deepened. “I cried more in three days than I have in my adult life,” Harris said. “You’re just waiting for the other shoe to drop.”
Harris recorded messages for his children. Told his father where he’d like to be buried. Moved all of his money into his wife’s bank
account. Yaffe and the twins video-chatted with Harris each day and shared text messages between naps. They knew he was scared.
Yaffe, a self-described eternal optimist, kept speaking words of encouragement to her husband:
You’re going to be fine. You’re still valuable to us. It’s not your time.
“None of it really made sense to him as a physician, and all of those emotions sort of erupted,” Yaffe said. “While he was at the hospital, he said several times that he thought he was going to die.”
A well-intentioned doctor offered this uncomfortable reality. It’s OK to be anxious.
You have a disease that no one has had before in an age group that’s not supposed to be sick.
“That stuck with me,” Harris said.
The isolation was brutal. Zero in-person contact besides select hospital workers. In pediatrics, the slightest personal touch can mean everything to a sick child or nervous parent. Harris longed for the same.
His fever continued for two weeks. Harris focused on basic human functions to fight. Breathe. Drink. Eat. Yaffe and the twins encouraged him to walk, and when Harris found the strength, he moved across his hospital room. Small steps.
“I just had faith that he was going to be OK,” Yaffe said. “I can’t really explain it in more scientific terms. I just knew that he was going to come home.”
In hindsight, Harris considers himself fortunate. He never went on a ventilator. He avoided the intensive care unit. And, after the four scariest days of his life in that hospital bed, Harris made enough progress to be granted release.
“By sheer luck, the grace of God, or whatever you want to call it,” Harris said, “I happened to get better when others like me didn’t.”
Harris beat COVID-19. But his fight continues.
Harris retested negative, and just 22 days after his devastating diagnosis, he returned to work in the emergency room. Harris donated plasma once and has another visit scheduled. He’s joined virtual think tank groups whose sole mission is identifying the best medical path forward in the pandemic.
The science is still out on whether Harris carries an immunity to the virus. For him, it doesn’t matter: “I’ll help anyone who walks through the door,” he said.
His life perspective, forever altered.
Here they come now, walking out of the front door of the family’s home, all four together. Benjamin is holding hands with mom and dad, clasping their fingers close to his chest. Ayelet twirls around in a teal dress. The twins are smiling. Giggling now. The virus didn’t win.
Harris might not have pulled through COVID-19 without their love. Especially Yaffe’s words. Her faith never wavered.
“We always joke that we’re a power couple,” Harris said. “She’s the power. I make up the couple.”
Harris will continue his front-line work against the pandemic. The nightmare eventually will end. And when it does, the things we love must endure.