As COVID deaths reach new level, survivors face lasting effects
Jay Bialkowski is still unable to climb stairs. It’s something the 54-year-old Glastonbury resident had to face early on in his recovery from COVID-19.
“Stairs are almost impossible,” he said. “If I walk up a flight of stairs, the fatigue is terrible. It’s just this overwhelming exhaustion.”
Even though he recovered from COVID in April, in many ways, he’s still coping with the disease, both physically and emotionally. In addition to his fatigue, Bialkowski has what he calls “pretty strong PTSD,” and an attempt to return to work full-time at his job as a
public safety officer at Hartford Hospital lasted less than a week.
Getting sick, Bialkowski said, has changed his life dramatically. He said his main focus has just been to get better, and get through to the next day, so he hasn’t paid too much attention to the disease’s broader effect. But he’s frustrated with what he has seen.
“My aggravation is that we’ve turned into such a selfish, narcissistic country on so many levels,” he said. “I think we would get more accomplished as a harmonious community helping each other.”
The nation has passed the tragic milestone of 200,000 deaths from COVID-19, while the global amount is about to eclipse 1 million — and experts predict these numbers will continue to climb.
As of Thursday, a model created by the University of Washington’s Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation predicted the United States could reach more than 370,000 deaths by Jan. 1.
The numbers are sobering, said Dr. Zane Saul, chief of infectious disease at Bridgeport Hospital.
“This should be eyeopening for everyone, to see that we’ve already lost this many people and we could lose many more,” he said.
Connecticut has seen
roughly 4,500 COVID deaths, and while experts maintained the state is in a better place than it was at the start of the pandemic, they urged now is not the time to relax.
“We have be more disciplined — hand hygiene, social distancing and masking are more important now than ever before,” said Dr. Ajay Kumar, Hartford HealthCare’s chief medical officer.
He pointed out the state has seen a rise in COVID cases in recent weeks, which Kumar said has numerous potential causes, such as the Labor Day holiday and students returning to college campuses.
With cold weather approaching, Saul said people will be forced indoors more often, likely leading to more cases if they are not careful.
“The fall and winter ahead of us could be really bad if we loosen our restraint,” he said.
Those like Bialkowski are reminded each day of the disease’s potentially devastating impact that could even be life-altering, said Sarah Carpenter, a physical therapist at Gaylord Specialty Healthcare in Wallingford.
“You also have this huge subset of people whose lives were changed by the virus,” Carpenter said. “It’s a burden of a disease. It’s caused some patients to have health problems that could last their whole lives.”
Bialkowski said he still doesn’t know what the
long-term impacts of COVID will be on him. He became sick in the early days of the pandemic. On March 24, he started to feel ill. Two days later, he was in the hospital with a cough and a fever that was nearing 104 degrees.
When he got to the hospital, Bialkowski was instructed to call his family and tell them he was being placed in a medically induced coma. It was terrifying, Bialkowski recalled, and he is still overcome with emotion speaking about it.
“I remember lying in the
trauma room thinking ‘Holy (expletive) — I’m not in control of anything,’ ” he said.
Eventually, Bialkowski recovered. He woke up from the coma and was transferred from the hospital to Gaylord, where he had rehabilitation therapy. Gaylord has released 108 COVID patients, many of whom have had long-term effects from the illness, Carpenter said.
Carpenter said many patients she’s seen who have spent time on a ventilator have some lingering effects.
“It’s affected people’s ability to go back to work,” she said. “We have people pretty happy go lucky who are now petrified to go out in the world” because they fear getting sick again and not surviving.
Even months after being released, Bialkowski is still struggling, but he’s learning to cope with his new reality. Though his attempt to return to work full-time didn’t pan out, he now works part-time at the hospital in guest services. And while stairs are too daunting for him, Bialkowski can walk
on flat surfaces without trouble.
He can even golf, provided he uses a cart.
But Bialkowski knows he’s still not at 100 percent, and isn’t sure when — or even if — he’ll get there.
“We’re just trying to figure out how to get through this,” he said. “It’s hard to realize my limitation and not knowing if I’m going to come back from this. (But) I’m a fighter. I’m going to fight through this and my wife and I going to come out stronger on the other end.”