Two years into the pandemic, five Connecticut survivors tell of beating COVID-19
Gabriel Cid was in an induced coma for 21 days, suffering through vivid nightmares that remain in his mind almost two years later. Carrie Howe couldn’t think straight and was so sick at one point she feared for her life. Kristina Gregory, after a bout with COVID-19 that felt like “the flu times 45,” found a way to give back.
The ongoing coronavirus pandemic has affected just about everyone in Connecticut, either personally or through the suffering and loss of loved ones, neighbors and co-workers.
As the pandemic approaches the two-year mark, The Courant talked to survivors about their confrontations with the disease, including several people who were infected in the uncertain days when the virus emerged as a global crisis.
21 days
In late March/early April of 2020, Gabriel Cid, 47, of Greenwich, began feeling weak and developed fever and chills.
The married father of three adult children went to an urgent care clinic where he was told he likely had COVID-19. A test confirmed the infection.
Cid was home, drinking fluids and resting on April 12 when his wife noticed his lips were blue. A check at the Greenwich Hospital emergency room showed his oxygen level was alarmingly low.
Admitted to the hospital, Cid was positioned on his stomach for 16 hours to help clear his lungs, but he was not getting better. He was then put into an induced coma on a ventilator for three weeks.
“Right before I was ventilated,” Cid wrote in an Instagram post on the one-year anniversary of his hospitalization, “Nurse Ellen asked if I wanted to Zoom with my family. I did not want my family’s last memory of me to be of a crying, scared sick man. She instead asked if I wanted to pray. She held my hand as we said the Our Father. I have never felt that level of fear in my life.”
All he remembers from those days are grim dreams, including a nightmare about the death of his mother, who is still alive.
“For some reason, they were so vivid and so dark they were kind of burned into my brain,” Cid said
Cid spent a total of 40 days in the hospital. Upon release, he was unable to walk or swallow and spent another week at an inpatient rehabilitation center in Stamford.
Before COVID-19 hit him, he was overweight and not eating right. The infection woke him, Cid said, to the need to change all that.
On the one-year anniversaries of entering and leaving the hospital, he ran 5K races and remains committed to a workout regimen six days every week.
“COVID saved my life,” Cid said.
He also remains forever grateful to the doctors, nurses and other health care workers who helped bring him through those dark days and has helped raise money for Greenwich Hospital.
‘Felt like I was going to die’
Carrie Howe, 39, was suffering from body aches, nausea and chronic coughing when she tested positive for the coronavirus in early December 2021.
Two days later, the manager of a Hartford soup kitchen fainted in her home after getting out of the shower. Howe was taken by ambulance to Manchester Memorial Hospital, where she stayed for four days on a regimen of medications that included Remdesivir.
She was home for 1 1/2 days when another wave of illness slammed her.
“I just felt like I was going to die, like I knew I was going to die,” she said.
Again she was rushed to the hospital. This time, doctors discovered blood clots in her lungs. Doctors told her they were not sure when the clots developed or if they were related to COVID-19, but in a way, Howe said, the virus saved her life because the dangerous embolisms were diagnosed.
Another notable effect of her long illness, Howe said, was brain fog. She would have food in her mouth for five minutes and forget to swallow. Finishing a 100-piece puzzle took six hours.
Her advice for anyone who gets COVID-19: drink a lot of water and get up and get moving, even if you have to drag yourself out of bed.
“The more you lie down, the more it takes over you,” Howe said.
COVID and ‘diet COVID’
Kristina Gregory, 53, of Darien, fell sick on March 15, 2020, when the world was just waking to the severity of the virus.
The married mother of two boys went to Stamford Hospital emergency room, where she was tested for COVID-19. Test results, however, would not be available for 11 days, and in the interim, Gregory had to tell people she had been in contact with that she had no definite answers.
She was bed-ridden for about two weeks and lost her sense of taste and smell.
“Everything tasted like drywall,” Gregory said, but then again, “I could cut onions all day long.”
She had kept in shape before the illness, and a doctor friend told her to avoid the hospital unless she had severe breathing problems.
Her husband and two sons tended to her while keeping their distance, Gregory said, and none of them caught the virus at that time. All three tested positive recently, but they were vaccinated and had no severe symptoms, Gregory said.
“I call it ‘diet COVID,’” she said.
After she recovered, Gregory, an insurance broker, said she donated plasma five times.
“This is the worst illness of my lifetime,” she said. “I was determined to be part of the solution.”
‘You can only listen to so much music’
Bernie Hallums, 58, a retired Manchester police officer, was infected in the first week of December. His symptoms included chills, muscle aches, extreme fatigue and congestion.
Like others throughout Connecticut, Hallums said his search for an available PCR test was futile.
“I didn’t feel well enough to keep driving around the state,” he said. A home test was positive for the virus, and Hallums stayed in his house. Friends checked in and dropped off food. Congestion in his head was bad, and fatigue and boredom took over.
“You can only listen to so much music. You can only watch so much television,” he said.
Recovery has been arduous, Hallums said. He works out and said, “It’s been hard getting that endurance back.”
A long sleep
Paul Cichon, 63, of South Windsor, is a burly boxing coach, a former truck driving instructor and director of the Manchester Ring of Champions Society gym.
The virus hit him like a hammer in April 2020. Cichon lost his appetite and felt drained. Just getting dressed took 20 minutes, and he had to lean against the wall halfway through a shower. He could take only shallow breaths, Cichon recalled.
His daily routine was to come downstairs from bed and sprawl in a recliner, sleeping for two-thirds of the day. Cichon said he was scared to go to the hospital “because I was afraid I wouldn’t come out.” News reports of the dead being stacked in refrigerated trailers drove his choice, he said.
“I wasn’t going in there,” Cichon said. “If I’m going to die, I’m going to die right here with my girlfriend.”
His dreams, he recalled, were super-realistic, a quality that has not returned with recovery. Cichon said he would dream of a childhood friend who had died months before and remember it just as if the man in the flesh had visited.
His girlfriend had been infected at the same time, Cichon said. Her sons would leave food on the doorstep and then run like the house was full of lepers, he said, laughing.
After about three weeks, the former East Hartford public works crewman had lost 30 pounds.
“It hit me hard,” he said.
Jesse Leavenworth can be reached at jleavenworth@courant.com.
