Woman Details How COVID Nearly Killed Her Dad Without Him Catching The Virus

Photo via @summerbrennan/Twitter, U.S. Department of Health & Human Services

September 28, 2021, 10:20 am

Nonfiction writer Summer Brennan penned a Twitter thread on Tuesday morning that quickly began to go viral for its harrowing — and unfortunately yet unfinished — story of how COVID-19 nearly and may still kill her father even though he has not contracted the virus.

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Instead, her dad came down with viral pneumonia after having to go to the hospital for a fall that was annoying to him but not life-threatening and was left without proper treatment because every hospital in the area and even out of state was completely overwhelmed with unvaccinated COVID cases.

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This is far from the first story of someone being denied care due to a lack of doctors and ICU beds during the latest COVID-19 pandemic surge, but the details in this story, which could still end in tragedy, are particularly harrowing.

My dad was not in the ICU, but in a physical rehab unit of the hospital to help him with his leg. They now say they did not know he had pneumonia at that point. He collapsed on the floor in his room and was left there, unnoticed, for six hours.

— Summer Brennan (@summerbrennan) September 28, 2021

It’s not unusual, particularly for older persons, to catch viral pneumonia in a hospital where the viruses responsible can easily proliferate. What is unusual is to leave a patient alone on the floor for six hours until he’s nearly dead, then putting him on a ventilator in a storage room because there was nowhere else he could stay.

Twenty-four hours later, he was off the vent and his oxygen levels were restored. My siblings, who live closer, flew in. I spoke to him, and he was out of it but okay. Surely he would get treatment now. We thought that was the worst of it. It was not.

— Summer Brennan (@summerbrennan) September 28, 2021

After he recovered from this completely preventable incident, Brennan’s dad would continue his trek through this horror story thanks again to unvaccinated COVID patients. He needed tests done on his heart and lungs by the appropriate doctors who could then treat the damage done by the near-death experience and time on the ventilator, but nobody was available.

The best they could do was put him back on the ventilator to keep him alive because even the largest hospitals in New Mexico were full.

In normal circumstances, they simply would have transferred my dad to a larger hospital. There were several close by. It would have been routine. But due to Covid, it was impossible—so impossible, they thought, that they didn’t even tell me he needed to be transferred.

— Summer Brennan (@summerbrennan) September 28, 2021

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Overworked doctors and nurses kept telling Brennan that her dad was improving on the ventilator until she received a call that would strike terror into the heart of any daughter.

“I finally called and got an exhausted, angry nurse who said bluntly: ‘we are tapped out and because of that your father is going to die. Maybe today. I’m sorry.’”

I demanded to speak to the doctor and he said more or less the same thing. The state was maxed out. My dad needed a cardiac ICU bed, or at least a cardiologist, and there was nothing for him. There was no hope, and no point even trying. Everywhere was full of the unvaccinated.

— Summer Brennan (@summerbrennan) September 28, 2021

With the burnt-out healthcare workers too exhausted and hopeless to help, Brennan was left on her own to call every hospital she could find and beg for help online for five hours. Her dad’s doctor said he had even already called hospitals out of state from Texas to California and had no luck, but by some miracle she found someone willing to help in Albuquerque. They rushed her father there with just hours to spare before he likely would have died, but even then he wasn’t out of the woods.

So that was two weeks ago. If he’d gotten to that ICU even hours later, we would have lost him. They had to perform heroic acts to stabilize him. In a week his pneumonia had been brought under control, and he was starting to heal. They talked about a full recovery. However.

— Summer Brennan (@summerbrennan) September 28, 2021

Being on a ventilator for that long can cause damage that essentially makes the patient dependent on it. Some can be simply weaned off without much trouble, but others need significant medical intervention. Brennan’s father may be permanently disabled from a common case of viral pneumonia that wasn’t even complicated by another illness. The doctors had to intubate him again and perform surgery to put a hole in his windpipe to help him breathe — something which may or may not be permanent.

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To save my dad, they had to perform a tracheostomy for long-term weaning from the ventilator. That means making a hole in his windpipe. “Like Stephen Hawking,” someone said. It might be temporary, it might not. They didn’t know if it would save him, but so far at least, it has.

— Summer Brennan (@summerbrennan) September 28, 2021

Before this happened, according the Brennan, her father was entirely independent, living without much trouble in his rural New Mexico home. Even now, he still might not enjoy a full recovery from something that started as a simple, non-life-threatening fall, all because too many people refused, hesitated from, or were not able to get the COVID-19 vaccine.

Though Brennan acknowledges her story isn’t exactly unique, her family still had to make a GoFundMe campaign in order to help pay her father’s medical bills because this is America.

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*First Published: September 28, 2021, 10:20 am