After battle with COVID-19, Charlotte high school coach admits: ‘I’m a little nervous’

Mark Sutton, 43, had been in Carolinas Medical Center near uptown Charlotte for a few days in March, fighting COVID-19, when everything got really bad really fast.

Doctors had been giving the Butler High School football and basketball coach hydroxychloroquine, which has become a controversial drug in this pandemic, and Sutton believes it made him worse.

“I was in the room for two days and nothing going on,” he said, “and they tried the hydroxychloroquine. After that, I couldn’t get enough oxygen. I went from needing one liter to 10. They were getting close to going to a (ventilator).”

Sutton was sent to the ICU.

He had pneumonia.

He couldn’t talk on the phone much and started replying to all the well-wishes coming to his smartphone via text with the same thumbs up emoji. It was tough to do much else.

His family couldn’t be with him.

It was lonely.

Sutton, who has been a coach at Butler High for 15 years, really began to consider that he might not walk out of the hospital and leave his wife, Monique, alone to care for their two daughters, 18-year-old Payton and 21-year-old Fairen.

“Basically,” Sutton said, “a lot of negative things started coming through my mind. I was like, ‘I can’t breathe.’ I feel like I’m suffocating or I’m claustrophobic, and no matter how much oxygen they were giving me, it’s not working.”

His life became like a COVID-19 Groundhog Day.

The nurses would come into the room.

“Mr Sutton, you need to breathe,” they would say.

Sutton would reply, not always sure the words were coming out of his mouth as much as he was thinking them.

“I am breathing.”

Another tragedy in the family

This wasn’t the first time that tragedy, or near tragedy, had struck the Sutton family.

Seven years ago, Fairen Sutton, the family’s oldest daughter, was one of 1,428 Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools students to participate in “Heart Of A Champion Day.” That’s when student-athletes receive a free medical athletic screening valued at more than $1,500.

The screenings, still going on annually, are now conducted by Atrium Health and include a review a sports-specific medical and musculoskeletal exam, a heart exam and a vision test. The student-athletes also receive an electrocardiogram (EKG), which traces the heart’s electrical activity.

Sutton’s physical showed a rare heart defect: partial anomalous pulmonary venous return, a condition in the veins leading from the lungs to the heart.

Eight days after thinking she was having a routine physical, Sutton was having open heart surgery.

“She had too much blood flowing to one chamber of her heart from her lung and they had to correct it,” Mark Sutton told the Observer at the time. “We had no clue. She was playing ball no problem. The doctors said there would be no issues now, but later in life it could affect her, especially if she wanted to have kids.”

Fairen Sutton, a 5-foot-4 point guard, was forced to miss the summer of 2013 playing travel ball. She lost her appetite after surgery.

“It was tough coming back,” she said then. “I was out two months. I was really out of shape. I lost 10 or 12 pounds. In order to make me eat, my mom told me I couldn’t play basketball unless I did.”

But by winter, she was back. And she played well.

A 4.0 student in high school, Sutton would score more than 1,000 points in her career and earn a college scholarship to St. Edwards University in Austin, Texas. It’s a private Division II school founded in 1885. While there, Sutton made the President’s Honor Roll and the Dean’s List twice.

She recently graduated, but last March, her father had to fly out to help her pack her things. Fairen Sutton sold most of her larger items, so it was going to be a simple round-trip flight for Dad.

Only it wasn’t.

Mark Sutton said he felt fine when he left.

Things changed mightily once he got back.

A sickening flight? And a fight back

On March 21, Mark Sutton boarded that flight to Austin to get his daughter. He figures he got the coronavirus that causes COVID-19 at some point during that trip, likely on the plane.

Sutton works part-time at Charlotte-Douglas airport but said none of his co-workers there got sick. No one in his family got sick.

His first symptoms came the evening of March 22, just after the flight home. It started with a cough.

“It was nothing that I thought was serious,” Sutton said. “I thought it might be allergies or something.”

The next night, a Monday he clearly remembers, he didn’t have to go to work at the airport and he was sitting around the house and, all of a sudden, he just didn’t feel good. His wife, a nurse practitioner, quickly isolated him in the master bedroom. He wouldn’t leave for a week.

During that time, Sutton had several virtual doctor’s visits and a nurse came to the Sutton home, in full protective gear, to do a COVID-19 test. The nurse left a machine to measure his oxygen level and a blood pressure monitor.

The test later came back positive.

On March 30, when his oxygen level dropped to 88, his wife took him to the emergency room. She was not allowed to come in.

“She said, ‘You look short of breath,’ ” Sutton said. “I didn’t feel like I was. I thought I was breathing normally, but the machine said I wasn’t. She dropped me off at the (emergency room) door and I didn’t see her for 10 days.”

‘She’s busting her ass to keep me alive’

For the first two days in the hospital, Sutton was on his own before the hydroxychloroquine and the ICU and the downhill spiral.

“I was thinking this might be it for me,” he said. “I was so worried about wanting to breathe, and the more you talk, the more you lose oxygen. My wife would call every day and the doctors would come in, but I wouldn’t talk for long. I wanted to concentrate on breathing.”

The doctors told Sutton his lungs were filling with water and began to treat that and also administered antibodies intravenously.

Just as quickly as Sutton had slipped downhill, he turned around.

He was discharged on April 10, 11 days after he went in.

He had to isolate at home for two weeks and had to keep checking his oxygen level and, for the first time, he began to have pain. Parts of his back would hurt, around the back of his ribs and lungs. Doctors prescribed muscle relaxants. He took more cough medicine than he can remember.

“I was trying to think positive,” he said, “but find places to not move. Sleeping in a chair felt more comfortable. The more I moved, the more I hurt. I had more physical pain than those 10 days in the hospital. I was trying to stay focused and felt like I gotten through the worst of it. I’m out of the ICU, and now I’ve got to deal with the aftermath. But I couldn’t get my own food. My family, my wife, did everything. I said, ‘I can’t be negative when she’s busting her ass to keep me alive.’ ”

Today. And tomorrow

About four weeks ago, on May 3, Sutton woke up and felt almost like himself again. It hit him as suddenly as the COVID-19 once had done.

The cough quieted down. He was out of home isolation by now, but always kept his mask on. He took another COVID-19 test at his church, Our Lady Of Consolation, and the results came back negative. But tests showed he now had antibodies to fight the virus.

On Thursday morning, Sutton took a run for the first time. Previous attempts at walking were met with mixed results. A few times, as he and his wife started off, Sutton felt some tightness in his chest and turned around. But gradually, he kept getting better.

Sutton is used to running with the girls basketball teams he coaches at Butler — he’s chief varsity assistant and head junior varsity coach — and he desperately wanted to feel like normal again.

So Thursday, he ran.

And it felt, well, like it always has.

“I’m 95 percent now,” he said. “I wanted to push myself. My legs were hurting because I hadn’t worked those muscles in forever, but as far as my chest goes, I’m a lot more comfortable.”

Sutton said he’s happy to be alive. He knows people are dying from this disease. As of Thursday, there were more than 1.7 million cases of coronavirus in the United States and more than 100,000 dead, according to numbers from the John Hopkins University of Medicine.

“This is real,” Sutton said. “People have to take it more seriously. Wear your mask. I wear my mask and keep hand sanitizer everywhere. People don’t understand until it hits home. For me, it hit home and made me think about life.”

Sutton said his three neighbors, all in the same house, got COVID-19, but he doesn’t think they got it from him. He said they quarantined at home for four days and never had his experience.

He said he wouldn’t wish his experience on anyone.