Lung transplant recipient beats COVID-19
Michigan man a survivor after long fight with virus
DETROIT – Paul DeWyse bounded down the steps with ease at Hart Plaza downtown on Saturday, smiled broadly and took in the warm sun, grateful to be alive.
He wasn’t sure he’d survive long enough to see this day – one year since the coronavirus pandemic devastated the world, taking the lives of 15,666 Michiganders and more than half a million people nationwide, and one year since he contracted the virus himself.
A lung transplant survivor, DeWyse, 58, of Livonia had one of Michigan’s first two confirmed cases of coronavirus and was the first COVID-19 patient to be hospitalized at Michigan Medicine, the academic medical center of the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor.
“I thought I was going to die because the only thing I knew ... about COVID was that people in China that had compromised immune systems were dying,” said DeWyse, a father of three. “I was crying. I was emotionally a wreck, and so was my wife. And she couldn’t even come and see me, you know? I mean, it was very, very emotional.”
Hours after he was told he tested positive, Gov. Gretchen Whitmer announced a state of emergency on live television.
It was surreal, DeWyse said. “Here I was, sitting in my hospital bed, watching ... Gretchen on TV talking about me,” he said. “There were reporters outside ... I could see them out my window, and they were all trying to figure out who I was.”
The date was March 10, 2020. It was on that day DeWyse became known as “a Wayne County resident with a history of domestic travel” in news reports.
He and an Oakland County woman who had traveled internationally were among the first 68 Michiganders tested for the virus; they got the first positive results.
Under little surveillance in early March, DeWyse’s case was an example of community transmission of the virus going undetected.
He and his family were overwhelmed and afraid.
“We were actually more scared he was going to die when we got the call that he had COVID than when he got his transplant surgery,” said his daughter, Megan DeWyse, 24.
Her father needed the transplant because he has a rare genetic condition called alpha-1 antitrypsin deficiency that began attacking his lungs when he was in his late 30s. By the time he had his transplant in February 2018, his lungs were functioning at about 15% capacity, he said.
“I was on oxygen and all that stuff, so I was barely getting by,” DeWyse said. “I thought I was going to have to go on disability very soon, but luckily, it all worked out.”
Three days after surgeons transplanted healthy, 29-year-old lungs into his body, DeWyse was up and walking. He was allowed to go home two weeks after surgery, and within a few months, he was well enough to do things he couldn’t do in the 20 prior years when his lungs were failing.
He rode his mountain bike, took long walks with his dog, Jazz, and played golf, racquetball and pickleball.
DeWyse hoped the transplant would give him more time with his wife, Marci, and their three daughters, Megan, Molly and Afton. He dreamed that one day he’d walk them down the aisle at their weddings. He dreamed of having grandchildren.
COVID-19 threatened to snatch it all away.
‘A 99.9% chance you don’t have it’
In the weeks leading up to his COVID-19 infection, DeWyse, vice president of corporate development for Alloya Corporate Federal Credit Union, flew out of state twice.
In late February 2020, he was one of about 5,000 people at the annual Governmental Affairs Conference hosted by the Credit Union National Association in Washington.
“A lot of people after that convention – 75 that we know of – said they came back with what they call ‘the GAC crud,’ ” DeWyse said. “So 75 people came back and they were very sick, but ... they never got tested for COVID or anything. But I did, and it was COVID. So who knows? It could have been one of those spreader events and people didn’t even know it.”
DeWyse said he traveled to Texas, too, for work, but it’s impossible to know whether he caught the virus at the convention, on a plane or just living life as a deadly pathogen circulated undetected.
“It could have been at the grocery store,” he said.
He woke up on the morning of March 9, 2020, and felt fine. DeWyse said he went to a dentist’s appointment, then to work at his office in Southfield. A few hours later, a feeling of malaise washed over him.
“I just started feeling really weird, and my stomach started hurting, and I had a headache, and then it just kept progressing really quickly,” DeWyse said.
He vomited, and a fever spiked. “Then all the other symptoms hit me,” he said. “I had chills and body aches. I had a headache really bad, and I had diarrhea. I had every flu symptom there was.”
At that stage of the outbreak, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention advised Americans that the primary symptoms of COVID-19 were chest pain, shortness of breath and coughing.
It was such a new virus, health officials were learning on the fly, and didn’t know exactly what its hallmarks might be. Because DeWyse didn’t have those three complaints, he didn’t think he could have novel coronavirus.
Flu? Probably. COVID-19? No way. DeWyse called his doctor to report the symptoms and went to a hospital.
“That’s with any transplant patient,” he said, “anything you’ve got going, you just call your doctor and say you’re on your way to emergency, and they pretty much admit you, no matter what.”
Doctors tested him for influenza, but the result was negative. DeWyse was shocked.
“I thought it was flu, just really bad flu,” he said.
The World Health Organization reported that some people with COVID-19 complained of fatigue, aches and pains, nasal congestion, runny nose, sore throat and diarrhea.
“The nurse said, ‘Well, we’re going to test you for this thing called COVID-19. But, you know, there’s a 99.9% chance you don’t have it,’ ” DeWyse said. “They put me in isolation that same day, before they even knew. The next day, they told me. The doctor came in. My nurse was in the room and told me I had COVID-19, and I just freaked out.
“I was the first one at U-M hospital to have COVID,” he said. “And the doctors didn’t even know what to do. The nurses didn’t even know what to do . ... Even though they knew it was coming, it ... just kind of hit and they were like, ‘OK, here we are. Here’s our first patient.’
“They didn’t know how to treat a person with COVID, let alone a person with a double lung transplant with COVID.”
DeWyse takes a slew of medications to suppress his immune system to prevent his body from rejecting his transplanted lungs, but those medicinescould hamper his body’s ability to fight a coronavirus infection.
Marci DeWyse, 53, who hadn’t left her husband’s side when he had his lung transplant two years earlier, found herself shut out from the hospital.
He was in isolation, infectious. She was required to quarantine while test results were pending. She couldn’t hold Paul’s hand or talk to him face-to-face.
They communicated via a glowing screen, him in a hospital bed, her in quarantine in their Livonia home.
In the weeks and months that followed, their experience was repeated by millions of other families as hospitals clamped down on visitors to prevent the spread of the virus, and critically ill patients died without loved ones at their bedsides.
“I would just pray every night and every morning,” Marci said. “The first couple of nights when I couldn’t sleep, I would just pray, ‘Please just let each day not be worse . ... Please let it be either the same or getting better because if it’s getting worse, we’re in trouble.’ ”
Guilt and blessings
Social media didn’t help a situation already steeped in worry, guilt and shame.
“There were people on Facebook throwing shade about our family, not knowing it was our family, saying, ‘Don’t they know how to wash their hands?’ because we were the first cases in Michigan,” Marci said.
Then she started getting sick.
“I was actually scared for myself,” she said.
On March 18, when Paul had recovered enough to be discharged from the hospital, his wife was too sick from COVID-19 to bring him home. Their daughter Megan drove to Ann Arbor to pick him up.
Marci was bedridden. The virus had stolen her breath and her ability to taste and smell.
“I did take a long time to ... not feel breathless when I would do the slightest thing,” she said. “I’d have to sit down . ... But now, today, I still have a weird smell. Things that used to smell yummy kind of smell weird.”
Her husband, she said, “snapped back better than I did, actually . ... He had those young fresh lungs.”
Megan DeWyse tested positive and temporarily lost her sense of taste and smell. One year later, those senses continue to elude Molly DeWyse, who also got a positive test result.
As for Paul: “I’m a survivor,” he said Saturday, his family surrounding him along the Detroit riverfront. “A lot of people didn’t survive COVID. A lot of people don’t survive lung transplants, and so it’s really sad . ... I feel amazingly grateful and lucky and blessed and everything.”
He said he doesn’t want his story to take away from the tragedy brought by the pandemic, the grief that so many feel after the losses of loved ones who didn’t survive.
“I’ve had three years with good lungs, and I can’t even tell you how much that means,” he said. “Nobody’s guaranteed time here on this Earth in life, but I have a little more . ... I’m loving life.”