Column: 30-year-old dad was hospitalized with COVID-19 for 44 days. 4 days after his release, he was readmitted and hasn’t been home since. ‘It’s terrifying.’
Jonathan Davila spent 44 days in Elmhurst Hospital after contracting COVID-19 in March. When he was discharged on May 5, his wife and their three children greeted him outside.
“We love you, Dad!” shouted his 5-year-old son, Mason.
Four days later, Davila was back at Elmhurst Hospital, where he stayed for another month. He was then transferred to Northwestern Medicine’s Marianjoy Rehabilitation Hospital in Wheaton where he has spent the last six weeks learning to walk and brush his teeth and write again. When he arrived at Marianjoy he couldn’t roll over on his own.
Davila is 30. His reaction to COVID-19 is a cautionary tale about how severely and unexpectedly the coronavirus can ravage a body, even the body of a young and otherwise healthy person.
“This is a very serious, potentially deadly disease,” said Dr. Robin Cohen, one of a team of physicians, nurses and therapists working to restore Davila’s health. “And even if you survive it, you may be left with a tremendous amount of disability.”
The majority of people diagnosed with COVID-19 have a mild illness, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and recover without hospitalization. But a pernicious trait of the coronavirus is the wild fluctuation in the way it manifests, both while people are infected and as they recover.
Davila, who lives in Addison, doesn’t know how he caught the virus.
“People ask me all the time,” he told me this week. “I have no idea. Before March, I was out like everybody else was — grocery shopping, going to work, going to the movies, everything.”
In mid-March, he was suffering from a persistent cough that he thought was bronchitis. When he started to have trouble breathing he went to Elmhurst Hospital, where he was diagnosed with COVID-19.
He was on a ventilator for 21 days, which left him with a pressure wound from not being able to move. The wound became infected, which required surgery to remove dead tissue. That surgery meant he needed a colostomy bag to keep the wound from becoming reinfected.
“He’s in a significant amount of pain,” Cohen said. “It hurts very much to sit up, and sitting on his wound doesn’t allow the wound to heal. But participating in therapy requires you to sit.”
During the acute part of his illness, Davila developed kidney failure and needed to be on dialysis. While he’s no longer on dialysis, Cohen said his body exhibits signs of kidney injury. He’s on medication to retrain his bladder to expel liquids.
In addition, Cohen said, Davila is battling the critical illness polyneuropathy, a neuromuscular complication that develops in about 25% of patients who are mechanically ventilated in the intensive care unit for at least seven days.
That complication has left him with severe weakness in all of his limbs. Six weeks of daily physical and occupational therapy have started to strengthen his shoulders, arms and legs, Cohen said, but his wrists, hands and feet are struggling to catch up. He uses state-of-the-art robotic equipment to regain the use of his extremities.
“It could’ve been worse,” Davila said. “I could’ve not been here. I thank God I’m alive, and all I can do is just push myself and try my hardest and hope everything fits in place.”
He hasn’t seen his children in person since March, when he was first hospitalized. His wife, Ashley King, is able to visit him at rehab, but he keeps in touch with his kids through FaceTime.
“It’s not the same, talking to them on the phone,” he said. “I get to laugh with them. I get to joke with them. But I don’t get to hold them. I don’t get to be with them, period.”
Their youngest child is 9 months old. Their oldest is 16. King said she and the children all tested positive for the coronavirus antibodies, but none of them have fallen ill. She’s nervous about the coming school year, unsure whether to send her kids into a classroom.
“It’s terrifying because you don’t know what COVID does to people,” King said. “I don’t know anybody who’s been through this except for me.”
She can’t arm herself with research on the long-term outcomes of COVID-19 patients. She can’t join a support group for spouses or survivors of COVID. It’s all too new. There are so many unknowns.
“I’m just grateful he’s alive,” King said. “I’d rather have a little bit of struggle and have him here.”
Cohen said it’s impossible to predict whether Davila will make a complete recovery, but his determination leaves her optimistic.
“When I first met him at the beginning of June, he couldn’t hold himself upright,” she said. “He’s made great progress in six weeks. He puts in a 200% effort, and that’s part of recovery. You have to work hard at it. It’s not easy and it hurts.”
Davila turns 31 in August. He should be back home by then, having switched to outpatient therapy. He hopes to return to his job at a machine maintenance company in Chicago.
“I miss home, but my mentality is here,” he said from his room at Marianjoy. “I have to get better. I have to strive to do what I have to do to get my body back where I was. I have to push myself to go back to my family as normal as I can be.”
Cohen credits “an army” with helping Davila reach his current state of recovery.
“I call them unsung heroes,” she said. “They’re lending their tremendous expertise, skill and devotion to work together as a team, from the nursing staff to his case manager to the therapy staff to the psychologist he’s seeing on a regular basis to the spiritual care team to the pharmacist to the wound care team to his wonderful, supportive family.”
Davila said he wants his story to convince COVID-19 skeptics that the virus is no joke.
“I hear people on social media say it’s fake, it’s not real,” he said. “I wish it was fake, you know what I mean? I wish it wasn’t real. I wouldn’t be here. But it’s real. I’m a young person and I caught it. And I caught it bad.”
He’s brave and generous to share his story with the public. Our understanding of this virus is shifting and growing by the day, and his challenges are a potent reminder of its severity and unpredictability.
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