Two years after having COVID-19, Eva Day still struggles to breathe.
“The breathing is a really big thing and it’s not that it’s going to get better," said Day, 63. "Even if (doctors) do surgery, they can’t promise that it’s going to get better."
It's been three years since the World Health Organization declared COVID-19 a pandemic. There have been over 12,000 deaths in Connecticut.
For Day, besides her struggles to breathe, she also has trouble speaking, which can make it difficult to run her business, Design by Day LLC, where she works as a contractor to help remodel houses and properties.
Still, the Greenwich native-turned-Stamford resident said she considers herself “so lucky” to have survived.
Day said her symptoms began in early January 2021, when she started to feel "lousy," and had a mild fever. A few days later, she was coughing up blood and went to Stamford Hospital, where she told staff that she thought she had COVID.
About a week into her hospital stay, doctors intubated her and she had to stay like that for almost a month because one of her lungs collapsed.
“They told my son that if I code, it’s not even worth reviving me because my lungs would not make it,” Day said.
Day’s son, Eric Day, who is now 31, also was hospitalized with COVID around the same time. He said he was in the hospital for 10 days and the day he was discharged, he begged the hospital staff to let him see his mother.
“They let me in, they made me gown up and had me put on all of the (personal protective equipment), but I was literally getting discharged from the hospital for the same disease, so the risk was exceedingly minimal,” Eric Day said. “It was the one comfort that they could give me, as things were not looking good at that time.”
Dr. Michael S. Fusco, who has been Eva Day’s doctor for over 25 years, said some people, like Eva, face more extreme symptoms due to a cytokine surge. Cytokines are products of certain white blood cells in the body, which combat diseases, but some people’s immune systems respond too aggressively.
It's like a bee sting, Fusco said: A person can get their first bee sting and just have a little bit of redness, but then that same person can get another bee sting years later and have an anaphylactic response.
“The reason for that is you had a hypersensitivity reaction to that venom,” Fusco said. “When (COVID) came out, unfortunately we had never seen anything about this before.”
On March 1, 2021, Day was transported to the Hospital for Special Care in New Britain in case she needed a ventilator.
Danielle DeBlois, Day’s physical therapist, said when she first got to the hospital, she was “very impaired, very debilitated,” but over the course of her treatment, DeBlois said Day did “amazing.”
“She went from being bed-bound to being able to walk with a walker,” DeBlois said.
Day said, from January to mid-March, she couldn’t do daily tasks, such as washing her hands.
“I’ll never forget when they finally put me in a wheelchair and I said, ‘Let me just do one thing, I just want to wash my hands,’” Day said. “And I’m there at the sink, washing my hands and I’m crying because I haven’t had running water on my hands.”
Dorothy Sowinski, Day’s occupational therapist, was with her when she had her first shower at the hospital and said “it was extremely emotional.”
“I remember how excited she was when she was finally able to take a shower,” Sowinski said. “That was huge.”
Even today, Day said that learning how to walk again was “the craziest thing” that she has had to do.
“No matter what I’ve done, when you can’t walk and they tell you to lift your right leg and you can’t move it because you have no muscles, you don’t realize how feeble you are and how helpless,” Day said.
At the hospital, DeBlois said they do a six-minute walk test as a marker for pulmonary and COVID patients, who are oxygen dependent or are weaning off of oxygen.
“She went from non-ambulatory bed-bound to being able to walk,” DeBlois said. “I believe she did over 600 feet on her discharge six-minute walk test, which was pretty impressive.”
On March 31, 2021, Day walked out of the hospital and went back to her Stamford home, also the home base for her business, Design by Day LLC. While she was in the hospital, her son took over her business.
Due to her speech difficulties, Day said, she has seen a speech therapist, and has had electrodes put in her neck and throat. The long-term effects of her COVID battle have presented challenges to her work, she said.
“In reality, yes I have a construction company, but I’m selling somebody a dream that I am drawing for them as they’re talking to me and I’m attaching a new building to their house and I have to be able to sketch it, give them the idea of what they want and speak it and sometimes it’s really difficult to do that,” Day said.
Along with trouble breathing and speaking, Day said, a few months after her release from the hospital she started to lose her hair, but it has, since then, grown back. According to the American Academy of Dermatology Association, this can happen a few months after having an illness, such as COVID.
Since 2021, Day has also been horse back riding to gain back her balance, which she said she lost after being sick.
"It's like you have a permanent ear infection, but you don't," Day said. "I don't know if it's COVID or it's part of the whole process."
In spite of this, Day said she knows how fortunate she is to have survived her illness and gotten a chance at moving forward.
“Sometimes when I wake up in the middle of the night, I’m like, ‘I’m so grateful to be alive,’” Day said.
