Coronavirus: Coming full circle
Former COVID patient grateful to receive the vaccine
Dan Bisset from Clarks Summit and Dr. John Sobuto both admit they felt emotional on Sunday when the critical care physician gave Bisset his second dose of the COVID-19 vaccine.
“I was tearing up a touch,” Bisset said Wednesday during a Zoom interview arranged by Geisinger, explaining March 7 marked the one-year anniversary of his trip to a beer-tasting festival in Brooklyn, where he believes he contracted the coronavirus and within a couple of days became deathly ill.
“It was honestly one among the best moments of my life,” Sobuto said of administering the vaccine, calling it a symbolic “coming full circle” as Bisset continues to recover.
“I remember when Dan came in,” Sobuto said, recalling how he checked out a CT-Scan and felt scared, realizing the strange new virus that had been affecting people in other countries was “in our backyard.”
After Bisset’s admission to Geisinger center in Danville, as his lungs struggled to urge oxygen, Sobuto realized that even with the help of a ventilator, “he simply couldn’t be oxygenated enough. For an otherwise healthy guy to be this ill was so frightening, beyond words I could describe.”
South made the difficult option to place Bisset on an EMCO device. The acronym stands for extracorporeal membrane oxygenation, and therefore the machine removes the patient’s blood, puts oxygen into it, and pumps the blood back to his body.
“Tubes the dimensions of garden hoses undergo the groin area and neck,” the physician explained during a previous interview when he described the “high risk/high reward” situation of using EMCO.
As the physician reminisced on Wednesday, “I knew that was Dan’s only shot. I couldn’t let him deteriorate to death.”
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Fortunately for Bisset, those days of the EMCO machine and 25 days within the hospital, with almost half of them spent during a medically induced coma, are behind him.
His journey of recuperation is “still ongoing,” Bisset told reporters on Wednesday, explaining he takes physiotherapy twice every week and has received psychological counseling that helped him affect the toll COVID took on his family.
“I didn’t want my father to urge it,” he said, noting his father gave up the ghost from COVID, his mother spent a while in Geisinger’s ICU due to COVID and his wife had to quarantine for 14 days due to her asymptomatic case.
On a physical level, Bisset said, he’s frustrated that breathing isn't as easy because it was before he got sick.
“You think it’s just ‘suck in’ and that’s it, but it’s tons more involved,” he said, explaining that he’s learning to pace himself and hopes to eventually return to his job as a hard hat.
Dr. Karen Korzick, co-director of critical care medicine at Geisinger center, said she understands the frustration of coronavirus patients who have long-lasting effects.
“There are still tremendous, open-ended questions,” she said.
But the vaccines that are now available have given new hope to numerous.
“Thank God for science. Thank God for American ingenuity,” Sobuto said, adding on a lighter note that he hopes to someday soon share a meal with Bisset at the State Street Grill in Clarks Summit since they both live there.
Hoping that restaurant meals and other “normal” activities will soon be back on many people’s agendas, Bisset urged everyone who can get a vaccine to try to do so.
“Speaking as someone who was within the ICU,” he said, “I’ll take short-term, one-day side effects over the virus.”
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