‘Go home. I’ll be here a while,’ COVID-19 patient texted his wife. He was gone 23 days
Lacey resident Tom Hubbard and his wife, Marie, recently needed to pick up some medications.
As they walked up to their destination, they overheard a conversation. One man was asking another why he wasn’t wearing a mask. Tom Hubbard couldn’t help himself and interjected aloud what he was thinking.
“Everybody should wear a mask,” he said, leading the maskless man to reply that he would put on his mask as soon as he got into the building.
Before the conversation escalated, Marie took her husband by the hand.
“Patience, patience,” she said. “It’s not something you need to get into.”
Her husband, whether he’s at the pharmacy or a grocery store, is now apt to react strongly to those who aren’t wearing masks. Like them, Tom used to be more carefree, too, thinking that the respiratory virus known as COVID-19 would pass as quickly as past swine or avian flu outbreaks. It was being hyped up by the news but wouldn’t be that serious, he told himself.
That was until he woke up on March 31 and couldn’t breathe. His wife rushed him to the Providence St. Peter Hospital emergency room, and doctors discovered that he had a blood oxygen level of 76 percent, when 95-100 percent is normal.
Marie was waiting in the parking lot because of coronavirus-related visitor restrictions. She eventually got a text from her husband.
“Go home,” he said. “I’m going to be here a while.”
COVID-19 in Thurston County
Thurston County has had 187 confirmed cases of the novel coronavirus since the first case was reported March 11, and Tom Hubbard, who is 61 years old, is one of them. Most here have recovered or are recovering from the disease, 27 have been hospitalized, including Tom, and there have been three deaths, according to Thurston County Public Health and Social Services.
In mid-March, Hubbard, who sells commercial restaurant equipment for a living, flew to Chicago for a business trip. That’s where he thinks he caught COVID-19 — possibly on the airplane, or in the airport, or from one of the 300 people at his training seminar. He began to feel flu-like symptoms there, and still felt the same way when he got home.
The disease is spread more easily than influenza, said Preeti Kondal, an infectious disease physician for Providence Health & Services in Southwest Washington.
“While it’s spread in a similar fashion like the flu, by respiratory droplets, experts have found that those who get COVID-19 spread it more to others at a much higher rate (3 to 5 times more) than influenza,” she said in an email to The Olympian. “For example, the median person with COVID-19 has been found to spread it to 5.7 people. For influenza, that number is 0.9-2.1 people.”
Around that time, multiple confirmed cases and deaths began to emerge from Kirkland Life Care Center, a nursing home, and Hubbard began to reconsider COVID-19. Maybe it’s going to be more severe than I thought? he said.
Still feeling flu-like symptoms with a slight fever, Hubbard got tested for COVID-19 at the Providence Medical Group testing site in Hawks Prairie. By the time he learned of the positive results, he was in bad shape. He couldn’t breathe and he felt dizzy and lightheaded, so Marie took him to the hospital.
She wouldn’t see him in person again for 23 days.
His COVID-19 experience
Unable to breathe, and with his blood oxygen levels dropping, Hubbard said he was induced into a coma at the hospital. Doctors began applying the playbook of fighting a disease that has killed more than 1,200 in Washington state and 115,000 in the U.S.: He spent 10 days on a ventilator; he was given the relatively new anti-viral medication, Remdesivir, which is thought to shorten the illness; and then he emerged from his coma.
“I was tired and exhausted, but I could breathe,” he said. Doctors and nurses repeatedly told him he was lucky to be alive after spending that much time on a ventilator.
The virus affects people in different ways, but it is thought to be especially hard on those with underlying health conditions. Hubbard is on blood thinners for blood clots. He’s also overweight and a type 2 diabetic. He suffered a heart attack when he was 41. And yet he survived COVID-19.
“We have found that symptoms are mild (or non-existent) for more than 80 percent of people who contract COVID-19 and don’t require hospitalization,” said infectious disease physician Kondal.
“For the 20 percent of people who are hospitalized, the majority have underlying health conditions,” she said.
Hubbard lost 40 pounds over the 23 days he spent in the hospital, and he didn’t see his wife in person until they rolled him out of the hospital in a wheelchair.
He got into the car, turned to his wife and said, “Hi.”
Marie Hubbard wiped tears from her face as she recalled the moment.
“I was relieved, happy, blessed,” she said. When he was on the ventilator, she regularly checked in with the hospital nurses or they called her. She got support from family members and a neighbor who took care of their yard.
“My family kept me sane,” she said.
Recovery
Although Tom had beaten COVID-19, he wasn’t away from Providence for long before his gallbladder needed to be removed. That was followed by a series of therapists who checked in on him while he was home, as well as a home health nurse.
All of that is over now and he is set to return to his Seattle-based job on June 15.
Tom called his battle with COVID-19 a humbling experience. His wife, meanwhile, who has no underlying health conditions, hasn’t developed symptoms that would require a COVID-19 test, she said.
Why not?
“Experts really don’t know yet,” said Kondal. “Research is ongoing and we are trying to figure out why some people are affected more than others. Is it genetic? Is it how much viral load you get? We will continue to know more over the next few years.”
