PRHC’s first virus patient discharged
‘You’re one breath away from catching this,’ Darlene Teslia advises
Peterborough Regional Health Centre’s first COVID-19 patient — who spent six weeks in hospital, including 25 days on a ventilator — has been discharged.
“Oh my God — I can’t believe I survived,” said Darlene Teslia in a phone interview Friday. “I lived — and I lived for a reason.”
Teslia, a 64-year-old retired social worker, is at home now in Peterborough. She was released from hospital on May 8 after three weeks in the intensive care unit on a ventilator and three weeks on an in-patient unit.
Meanwhile her partner, Jennifer Wilson, had COVID-19 at home.
Wilson was ill alone, with family and friends delivering necessities to her door, while Teslia was in hospital.
The illness for them is linked to travel: they’d been in Arizona shortly before showing symptoms.
Wilson retired Feb. 12 from her job as executive director of the Kawartha-Haliburton Children’s Aid Society.
Two days later, she and Teslia drove to Arizona to their new trailer home; they’d planned to stay three months.
But on March 16, a day before the federal government asked Canadians abroad to come home while they still could, the couple left Arizona to return to Peterborough. The drive took four days: in the early part of the trip, Teslia developed a worsening cough, while Wilson, who still showed no symptoms, drove. The day after they got back home, Teslia was very ill and Peterborough Paramedics came over to test her at home for COVID-19.
Within days, Wilson had developed symptoms and Teslia, delirious with fever, was taken to PRHC by ambulance. In her first few days home alone with COVID-19 while her partner was on a ventilator in hospital, Wilson was sick with COVID but didn’t rest.
“I spent the first 48 hours preparing our wills, contacting our next of kin, our executors, making safety plans for the dogs, expecting that I could go down at any moment,” Wilson said.
Next she cleaned and disinfected everything in the house and did 15 loads of laundry: “To me, everything had COVID on it.”
Meanwhile, Teslia was in a coma and couldn’t receive visitors. It was the longest separation the couple — together nearly 30 years — had ever endured. It was only once Teslia was off the ventilator — three weeks into her hospitalization — that Wilson could briefly visit.
“You so desperately need your family when you’re going through this,” Teslia said. “I missed Jennifer and the fur babies an unbelievable amount.”
Teslia remained delirious with fever in her first days off the ventilator, but as her condition improved she received physiotherapy to relearn how to walk. She’d been in good health before contracting COVID-19, she said, although she says her lungs have always been a bit weak. Teslia said she thinks her own determination, plus the devoted care of hospital staff and her partner, helped her survive.
On Friday, she said she tires easily and needs a walker. It’s unclear whether she will have long-term health effects, she said, but she’s glad to be able to walk.
These days the couple isn’t leaving home at all — they get groceries and necessities delivered — and they say they plan to stay home and not travel until there’s a vaccine for COVID-19.
Teslia says she’s concerned people aren’t staying necessarily home: “I think oh my God — you’re one breath away from catching this,” she said.
“We’re not being relaxed about this — we know it’s real,” Wilson said. “We lived the terror of it.”
The next several months will be all about staying home, gardening and “just being together,” said Teslia — and she’s grateful for that.