Currie was prescribed medication to help manage the symptoms and was sent home.
“The next morning, the hospital called to check on me and see how I was doing,” Currie remembers. “By that point, I was having trouble catching my breath. People couldn’t even understand me, so my husband got on the phone. They asked him to take my temperature. It was 102.”
There was no denying it anymore: She needed to go to the Emergency Room. She was reluctant. She especially didn’t want to end up in the ICU on a ventilator. But she knew staying home wasn’t a reasonable option, so in she went.
“It was a little weird being on the other side of it,” she said. “They didn’t treat me any different than another patient, so getting to see it from a patient’s perspective was new.”
The hospital’s care team immediately gave her an IV and oxygen. They also administered a monoclonal antibody infusion – the FDA-approved COVID therapy that is a game-changer for many patients fighting severe bouts of the disease – and waited for the fever to break.
Within a couple of hours, she started feeling well enough to go home.
“About three or four days later, I saw my primary care doctor, Dr. (Mark) James in our St. Tammany clinic in Folsom,” Currie said. “They did a chest X-ray, and he said , ‘You don’t look good.’ He said, ‘If it gets any worse, I want you to promise me you’ll go to the ER. I said, ‘I promise. If it gets any worse, I’ll go.”
A few days later, she would keep that promise.
Even after the antibody infusion, and after repeated doctors visits, she was having severe trouble breathing, especially when she slept on her back. She was laid so low that she had to send her 12-year-old son, who also contracted COVID, to be cared for by other family members for months.
At one point, Currie said, her husband found her asleep, on her back, with her lips turning blue. He later told her that she wasn’t so much breathing as she was gasping for breath, with a rattling sound coming from her lungs.
They immediately went to St. Tammany Health System’s standalone ER in Mandeville. “My butt didn’t even hit the chair before they took me into the back” to begin treatment, she said. Soon after, they told her they wanted to admit her to the hospital.
“At that point, I said, ‘OK. I understand. If that’s what we have to do, that’s what we have to do,’” Currie said. “They direct-admitted me, put me in isolation and they kept me on oxygen all night long at St. Tammany.”
After a night in the hospital, she was OK’d to return home. Her husband, a St. Tammany Parish Sheriff’s Office deputy, got approval to take a couple of weeks off to nurse her back to health. Slowly, and thankfully, she began feeling better.
By September, she was finally well enough to go back to work, but even today, she still isn’t feeling 100%.
Asked what she’d like to say upon reflecting on her ordeal, Currie had two messages.
The first: a genuine thank-you to her team at the cancer center for their understanding throughout – Paula Day, Jack Khashou and Lindsay Gomez among them – as well as to the coworkers who would become her care providers: Dr. James, Arlyn Arseneaux and others.
“Without them on my side, I would not be alive today to share my experience,” Currie said.
As for those who have yet to get vaccinated, she hopes her story will persuade them to get the shot and spare them from enduring what she did.
“Honestly, my message would be that preventative care is worth your life and the life of your family members,” Currie said. “It can happen to anyone. COVID does not care what your age is. It does not care what you believe in, what your blood type is. When it hits you, it hits you.
“We’d always been anti-vaxxers. Once we get those we need for school, that’s it. After this, it’s totally changed my mind, my outlook, my opinion, because it was a waking nightmare.”
St. Tammany Health System continues to administer free COVID-19 vaccines. Make your appointment via the free MyChart app or by calling (985) 898-4001.