Scarborough woman, 82, beat all the odds
Grandmother returns home after two-month battle with COVID-19
Two months and two days after Surujdai Sawh entered a Scarborough hospital with COVID-19, she was wheeled outside to cheers from nurses and other staff.
Television cameras and family were there waiting. “I was so surprised and shocked,” Sawh, 82, said in a recent interview.
At times, the odds seemed against her. Waking up from three weeks on a ventilator at Scarborough Health Network Centenary’s Intensive Care Unit, the first thing Sawh remembers is realizing her hands were tied to the bed frame.
Her recovery is nothing less than a second chance at life, she said.
“I don’t know what happened to me, but God bring me back. God bring me back.”
It was May 15, the Friday after Mother’s Day, when Sawh, who remembers she “wasn’t feeling that great,” was brought to Centenary with COVID-19 symptoms, coughing and fever.
The staff didn’t wait to confirm a COVID-19 test. X-rays showed Sawh had a doublelung pneumonia.
She transferred to ICU days later. A week after her admission, she was on a ventilator.
“She deteriorated rapidly,” said her son, Terry Sawh, adding doctors said once patients are on the device, which forces air into the lungs, “you have a slim chance of getting off.”
Sawh soon developed two additional lung infections, secondary pneumonias ventilators can cause. “All signs were not good,” Terry said.
Doctors have learned delaying the use of ventilators has advantages.
Dr. Martin Betts, chief and medical director of intensive care at SHN, said staff first give patients oxygen, then Optiflow, a high-flow oxygen system.
They also place COVID-19 patients on their stomachs, which helps them breathe.
“We try all the tricks to avoid the ventilator before we get to it,” Betts said.
With COVID-19, patients can expect to stay three to seven days in ICU, he added. “Once you’re on the ventilator, you’re looking at a month. That’s what I tell families.”
When Sawh arrived, 60 per cent of SHN’s ICU patients were confirmed or suspected of having COVID-19.
The hospital has had 90 COVID-19 admissions. About 25 per cent do not survive.
“You can almost predict who they are,” said Betts, because many have other major life-altering conditions, such as advanced Parkinson’s or kidney disease.
In her third week on the ventilator, Sawh fought off the secondary infections. Slowly, she started needing less oxygen, until she came off the machine. Terry credits “her health, and also her desire to live.”
He believes the quality of care she received was “exceptional.”
Waking was scary for Sawh. Her hands were tied so she couldn’t pull out the breathing tube snaking into her lungs.
She came back to herself slowly. The staff were all in face shields, masks and bonnets, doing their best to be compassionate. Nurses held patient hands, and used video conferencing to connect them with loved ones.
Sawh remembers one of her granddaughters, Shanti Sawh, a registered nurse working at Centenary, looked in on her.
She felt pain on the left side of her face and her throat remained sore. She forced herself to swallow puréed food, which was like soup.
Slowly, with a walker and a stair climbing exercises, her strength returned, and July 17 was set as her date to leave.
When the day came, she was able to walk unassisted up her bungalow’s front steps — lined with new pots of flowers arranged by her youngest son, Dicky — in Scarborough’s Ionview area.
Terry, meanwhile, served roti and curries to staff from all three units that treated his mother. “The average person doesn’t understand the amount of work they do,” he said. Sawh was born in 1938 in Vreed en Hoop, in Guyana, then British Guiana.
She and husband, Balkaran Sawh, who died last February, had rice and cane land and ran businesses in the capital, Georgetown.
In Toronto, the couple had a store at Old Kingston and Morrish roads in Highland Creek, Highland Creek Food Town, which was sold in 1986.
Sawh has a daughter and four sons. Having beaten the disease, she still faces a long recovery.
“I don’t want to go anywhere yet. I feel very weak,” Sawh told a toronto.com visiting reporter and photographer days after coming home.
So far, she’s breathing OK, she added, “but I don’t talk too much on the phone or anything.”
Lung injuries like Sawh’s can take up to a year to heal, sleep patterns for ventilated patients take time to readjust, and patients can look healthy but suffer depression, Betts said.
“We don’t know what a year down the road looks like for COVID-19 survivors.”