An update: Extraordinary stories of surviving COVID

They thought they would die. They lay entangled in webs of wires and tubes running from their bodies into strange machines. Their loved ones couldn’t be with them as they struggled to breath inside overwhelmed hospitals in a grinding global pandemic.

Since March 2020, at least tens of thousands of Georgians have survived hospitalization for COVID-19. The Atlanta Journal-Constitution has told the stories of people fighting severe COVID-19 cases to demonstrate the challenges.

Today, the newspaper reconnects with three survivors profiled in stories last year. While all have recovered, they say COVID has left its mark on their lives.

Blake Bargatze: Too Young To Die

Blake Bargatze has been enjoying simple pleasures: playing board games with his family, decorating a gingerbread house and watching his favorite Christmas movie, “Elf.”

Those very ordinary acts seem extraordinary considering the 25-year-old’s harrowing journey with COVID-19.

Bargatze, who grew up in Gwinnett County, spent much of this year fighting for his life, eventually receiving a double lung transplant at the University of Maryland Medical Center in June.

“When I look toward the New Year, I won’t do resolutions or anything like that,” he said in a recent interview. “I’m just grateful for every day I have. That’s all I can be.”

Credit: Contributed

Credit: Contributed

Bargatze is living temporarily in a small house near Baltimore. It’s close to the Maryland hospital where his condition is still being monitored through regular blood work and check-ups.

Dr. Robert Reed, medical director of the Lung Transplant Program at the medical center, said Bargatze is doing very well.

“If you saw him walking down the street, you would never know the guy had a lung transplant. He doesn’t look like a patient. He looks like a person,” Reed said. “It’s really quite remarkable, considering how sick he was to how well he is doing. It’s really quite heart-warming.”

But Reed said he realizes Bargatze is feeling cooped up and isolated, so far away from home. Over the holidays, his mother, stepfather and siblings all made the trip to Maryland so they could be together.

Reed said he had hoped to give Blake “an early Christmas present” and transfer his care to a hospital in metro Atlanta. But the emergence of the new omicron variant has forced him to put those plans on hold until after the holidays. The doctor wants to allow more time for researchers to learn about the new variant, especially how it may affect people who are immunocompromised.

Even if the variant appears to be not as bad as other iterations, Reed said, “it could still be terrible for him.”

Bargatze’s COVID-19 battle began in late March, before he was eligible for the vaccine. He attended an indoor concert in South Florida, where he was living at the time.

Credit: Contributed

Credit: Contributed

He started to feel ill within a few days and tested positive for the virus. A week later, he was struggling to breathe. He went to the emergency room, where doctors found his blood oxygen level was dangerously low and placed him on a ventilator.

When he didn’t get better, doctors determined he needed to be hooked to a life-sustaining artificial lung machine known as ECMO. The machine does the work of the lungs to give them time to heal.

Bargatze was transported to Piedmont Atlanta Hospital for that therapy. His lungs didn’t heal, though. So, in June, he was transported to Maryland for the lifesaving surgery.

Bargatze’s mother, Cheryl Nuclo, who has been a constant source of support throughout the ordeal, travels back and forth from Atlanta to Maryland every week or so.

Bargatze, who has resumed working full-time remotely as a financial broker, said he remains cautious. He tries to avoid germs, spending most of his time inside. He’s counting down the days until he returns to Atlanta.

“I really want to go home to see my friends and family and just be closer to everyone I know,” he said. “It’s been really hard to be so far from everyone. So I am especially grateful to be with family now.”

--Helena Oliviero

Edward DuBose: Minister survived COVID but remains traumatized

After church on a recent Sunday, Edward DuBose stepped into a restaurant and began a grim ritual.

First the 63-year-old surveyed the dining room of the Ole Times Country Buffet in Columbus. It was crowded, he thought immediately. DuBose noted the distance between tables and people. He thought everyone was too close. He checked faces for masks. Too few wore them.

If DuBose had been out to eat alone, he might’ve walked out. He knows it may sound strange for a person like him — a minister, a mental health counselor, a civil rights leader, a former drill sergeant — to be afraid of a Sunday lunch rush. But COVID-19 haunts the man.

DuBose spent three horrific weeks hospitalized with the disease in July 2020 and inspired others when he pushed his atrophied legs to walk again and became a vaccine advocate as he returned to his busy life. DuBose owns a counseling business and is a national board member for the NAACP. But even a year and a half later, as normal as his days of bouncing between meetings and appointments may appear, DuBose said he doesn’t feel back to normal.

“When you know that you have certain responsibilities, you have to operate almost, for lack of a better word, mechanically,” he said. “I know that I have to get up. I know I run a business and the business has got to run. I have a family and they have to eat. I know I have responsibilities in the NAACP. But I’m nowhere near normal.”

Credit: Courtesy:

Credit: Courtesy:

He feels the lingering damage every day. His lungs sometimes skip a breath. The fingers on his left hand pulse with what DuBose assumes is nerve damage from where he was strapped to an ICU bed. The most significant mark, DuBose said, was left on his mind.

DuBose’s anxiety rises with COVID case and death numbers, which he checks often. He sees people around him growing more comfortable, pulling off their masks in what they consider safe places. DuBose wears two masks and gloves.

He was wearing them when he arrived at Ole Times. Walking to a table in the back with his wife and a granddaughter, he tried not to look like he was panicking, but he was.

DuBose didn’t want to worry his wife, Cynthia, with his anxiety. She’d been through much with him after he went to the emergency room the day before their 36th wedding anniversary. Just before staff put him on a ventilator, the husband told his wife this would be their last, because he was dying. In his time in the hospital and every day since, she’d been with him, even when hospital protocols meant she couldn’t be there physically. Simply seeing her in the morning when he wakes gives him hope.

Now she sat at their table in Ole Times, talking with their granddaughter about something the DuBose couldn’t fully hear. His mind was spiraling away. He looked around the restaurant and saw danger everywhere. He didn’t focus on the protection his vaccine had given him or about all the trials he’d conquered in his 63 years. He thought about COVID taking him all the way out this time.

Silently, DuBose prayed: “You didn’t bring me this far to leave me.”

In a few moments, his nerves settled and he joined the conversation. DuBose had won again, and he intends to push through next time. DuBose is shaken and changed but not broken.

“I hope that my experience is completely behind me,” he said. “One day.”

--Joshua Sharpe

Greer Smith ― A Rural Hospital Fights to Save the School Principal’s Life

Sometimes, maybe riding together down the road, Greer Smith’s 11-year-old boy will speak up out of the blue.

“’Dad, you know how I was real worried when you were in the hospital?” he’ll say. “I’m glad to be with you.”

The events of July and August, when Smith survived severe COVID-19 in Georgia’s last surge, seem to linger in the background for Smith’s son Kellan, in a way they don’t for Smith himself.

For much of the experience, Smith was in a coma in a metro Atlanta hospital 200 miles away from home. Doctors put him in a coma in order to let an artificial lung machine work, filtering and oxygenating his blood then pumping it back into his body so his lungs could heal. Smith very nearly didn’t get to use the machine, called ECMO, because there weren’t enough for all the patients who needed it.

Smith is principal of the only high school in Jeff Davis County. Dr. Jason Laney and the staff at the tiny 25-bed Jeff Davis Hospital in Hazlehurst repeatedly called more than 40 facilities across the Southeast asking them to place Smith in an ECMO bed. Eventually, Northside Hospital Gwinnett agreed to take him.

Looking back, one of his doctors there, Allison Dupont, was quite sure what Smith’s chances were without ECMO: “Zero.”

Now, Smith says, he can hardly believe it all happened.

Credit: Handout

Credit: Handout

His pulmonologist told him in amazement last week that his lungs showed virtually no scarring. Physical therapy, to regain the muscle he lost during the 23 days he was bedbound, is a remote memory. Smith spent the fall coaching football again, fishing, then going on hunting trips. His work as principal of Jeff Davis High School is back full speed.

After the AJC wrote about his story, Smith appeared on CNN. Sitting in his fishing clothes, fresh off a Florida lake, he told his story and urged people to get vaccinated.

He and Stephanie weren’t vaccinated before he got sick, but now they’ve both had Moderna shots.

People around town know he’s had the vaccine, and they come up and ask him about it. A “close, close friend” kept careful track as Smith went through side effects, and Smith assured him the vaccine left him okay. “He went and got it,” Smith said. “He went and got it.”

Smith and his wife Stephanie say they’ve changed a lot of minds. He wishes they could change more. “I just wish it hadn’t gotten so political so fast,” he said. “I hate it.”

But Smith is full of gratitude for getting a second round of life. He just celebrated Kellan’s 11th birthday. When Kellan brings up the hospitalization every month or so, Smith says, it’s obvious how to respond.

“Dad, I’m sure glad you’re here,” Kellan said recently.

“Buddy, I sure am too,” he replied.

--Ariel Hart