The Register Citizen (Torrington, CT)
A long road to recovery
Skirting line between life, death, doctor, 74, survives COVID
PORTLAND — The wife of a local gastroenterologist is sharing the harrowing story of her 74-year-old husband’s more than four-month-long, life-threatening battle with the coronavirus.
Sumangala Huded, a senior attending physician at Middlesex Health, and internal medicine physician Prakash Huded run one of the few remaining private medical practices in one of the town’s rare octagon houses at 26 Marlborough St.
The two, who have been married for 42 years, live between an apartment above their office and a home in Haddam.
Her role of supporting Prakash Huded’s ordeal that hovered between life and death has been exhausting and allconsuming for Sumangala Huded, who is in the process of closing the practice to care for her husband full-time.
Even more frustrating, she is a pulmonary specialist and most of the extended families are doctors, including their son, a cardiologist, and daughter-in-law and nephews.
“It’s a mixed blessing — too much knowledge can be dangerous. We tried to monitor as much as possible at home, which is also not good,” she said.
Hope in a time of great crisis
Prakash Huded couldn’t breathe without a ventilator for a total of 70 days, and subsequently was in and out of
Middlesex Hospital.
He was first admitted April 13, while suffering extreme fatigue, a cough and a drop in oxygen levels for the prior three days. “That is so unlike him,” his wife said. “All he wanted to do was sleep and sleep and sleep.”
She knew right away it was COVID. Throughout those nights, she monitored his oxygen saturation like a nurse, sharing developments with their son.
The family believes Prakash Huded, who attends at four nursing homes, may have contracted the virus while seeing patients at one of them.
Sometimes obstinate, her husband refused to go to hospital, his wife said. The day before, he tried to get tested, but was told: “if you’re not sick enough to be admitted, we’re not going to do the COVID,” Sumangala Huded said.
A turn for the worse
A day or two later, they ended up in the emergency department. “His saturation had gone down to 80 percent at home. And he still wouldn’t go. He said ‘Nothing is wrong with me. I feel fine.’”
Normal readings usually register between 95 percent and 100 percent.
Their son finally convinced Prakash Huded to go, the only one who succeeded.
During the drive to the hospital, Prakash Huded continued to tell his wife it wasn’t COVID. “By then, I had begun to have some symptoms myself, but I was not sick enough to be admitted,” said Sumangala Huded, who later tested positive.
Two days later, her husband was intubated.
Prakash Huded tested positive for COVID-19 over a span of 60 days. He was hospitalized five times, the last being Aug. 12.
“Each time, he had a complication” — peritonitis, multiple sepsis infections and abdominal abscesses, his wife said.
“He almost died three times,” said family friend Dr. Elizabeth Rocco, a retired ophthalmologist who grew close to the couple while a patient of theirs. “It was so touch and go.”
“The oxygenation was so bad, they pronated him 100 percent — nothing,” Sumangala Huded said. “The hardest part was saying goodbye to him, thinking we were never going to see him again.”
‘ETMO is like a death sentence’
During the weekend of May 8-9, the section chief of pulmonary medicine told her he had exhausted most of his options, but wanted to try extracorporeal membrane oxygenation, during which blood is pumped outside of the body to a heartlung machine that removes carbon dioxide and sends oxygen-filled blood back to tissues in the body, according to the Mayo Clinic.
Blood flows from the right side of the heart to the membrane oxygenator in the heartlung machine, and then is rewarmed and sent back to the body, according to the website.
Her son said, “ETMO is like a death sentence. At his age, he’s going to have so many complications, he might lose a limb.”
At that point, Sumangala Huded contemplated making her husband a do-not-resuscitate order.
Somehow, he revived. “The next day, he turned the corner,” she said.
A long road ahead
He’s now undergoing rehabilitation at Gaylord Hospital in Wallingford. “He is awake, alert, cognitively fully there. He’s weak — especially in the lower and upper extremities,” his wife said. “He still has difficulty standing up. He is not able to transition from bed to chair, chair to bed.”
When Prakash Huded was removed from the ventilator, he was angry and depressed, his wife said. “How much more can my body take?” he would ask her. He also had trouble with time, thinking he was first hospitalized in June, rather than two months later.
If he is discharged on schedule Sept. 9, he will have been in acute care for about 150 days.
Sumangala Huded was unable to visit her husband while he was in intensive care, a heart-wrenching period, she said. It wasn’t until May 10 when she was allowed to enter his room. Her husband’s face was puffy, his eyes nearly closed, pictures show. Still, he smiled.
At one point, the two engaged in window visits, where Prakash Huded faced a picture window as she was outside. They spoke via cellphone, but she soon realized conversation was impossible.
“Those are not very easy, because there’s a lot of noise going on,” she said. “His speech is very slow, very slurred, soft, so I didn’t find them too useful.”
Since then, she and family members connect with him through FaceTime. “It’s much more meaningful conversations that we have,” Sumangala Huded said.
Prakash Huded often related vivid dreams he was having. “It was hilarious — he was smiling and laughing about it.
It was a little outrageous. He thought he was partying with the state attorney general,” his wife said.
Her husband has a wonderful sense of humor. “I think that is what’s getting him through,” she said.
A video taken during one of his occupational therapy sessions at Gaylord shows the physician walking haltingly, stepping a 20-foot distance by use of a walker, supported on both sides by staff. He sports a T-shirt: “No sense being pessimistic. It’ll never work.”
‘A good, old-fashioned doctor’
Rocco, who is especially indebted to Prakash Huded, keeps in touch with Sumangala Huded by text and phone.
Nearly two decades ago, Rocco’s father was diagnosed with colon cancer just before Thanksgiving. “Prakash Huded arranged for emergency surgery and made hospital visits like a good, old-fashioned doctor. That meant a lot to me,” she said.