‘The nurses are my angels’: COVID survivor shares his story

COVID-19 survivors Ray Lubrano and Gail Martello Evans are photographed in their Covington-area living room on Tuesday, April 28, 2020. While Evans didn’t require hospitalization for the virus, Lubrano was the second COVID-positive patient admitted to St. Tammany Health System and the first to be discharged after being put on a ventilator.  ‘Fight,’ Lubrano said when asked what advice he had for other COVID patients. ‘Fight hard. Never give up. Because the message they gave Gail was not a good message. They were preparing her for the worst. But never give up.’ (Photo by Tim San Fillippo / STHS)

By Mike Scott, mscott@stph.org

Ray Lubrano was in bad shape, no two ways about it.

His body was wracked by constant, violent coughing. He felt as if his lungs were filled with broken glass. He was so weary he couldn’t stand.

Beyond the intense pain, though, the St. Tammany Parish resident doesn’t really remember much about his fight with the COVID-19 coronavirus, save for one key fact: With help from a team of healthcare heroes – “my angels,” he calls them – he beat it.

“Am I a fighter? I guess you could say I am,” the U.S. Navy veteran and retired roadmaster for the New Orleans Public Belt Railroad said recently from the living room of his Covington-area home, “only because I demand a lot of myself. I work tirelessly. I can do just about anything.”

That’s why, he said, it was no small thing when, at the very beginning of his COVID ordeal – and while in the middle of painting his kitchen cabinets one Monday in March -- he surrendered, putting down his paintbrush and collapsing into bed.

That was March 23. It was the first sign he had contracted the novel coronavirus that was then just beginning to sweep the United States.

It would also be the start of a struggle that would soon become a fight for his life.

On March 27, Lubrano – who doesn’t know where he picked up the virus -- became one of the first COVID-positive patients admitted to St. Tammany Health System’s Covington hospital. Nineteen days later, he would be the second to go home and the first at STHS to be discharged after being put on a ventilator.

In those first days, though, he wasn’t thinking COVID. He thought it might be allergies. But soon enough, it was clear something far more severe than mere hay fever was at work.

“Within two days, I was down,” he said, “and it takes a lot to knock me down.”

He tried to ride it out at home at first, he said, calling his doctor for advice. At times, he thought maybe he was getting better. It would always come back, though, and it would come back with a vengeance.

Four days in, Lubrano was in such bad shape that his fiancée, Gail Martello Evans – who would end up battling a COVID case of her own, though not one requiring hospitalization – insisted he let her take him to St. Tammany Health System’s Emergency Department.

He wasn’t in a position to refuse or resist.

Some people close to him, driven by fears of the unknown in those early days of the outbreak, advised him to steer clear of the hospital. But he didn’t see another alternative. Neither did Evans.

While talking to a hospital representative via phone while driving to the ER, Evans learned that STHS – like all other Louisiana hospitals, in keeping with state Department of Health guidelines regarding COVID-19 patients – couldn’t allow her into the facility.

“They told me …, ‘You’re not going to be able to go in. You’re just going to have to drop him off,’” Evans said, emotion creeping into her voice. “That was the most horrific feeling. They come, they take him, they have masks on, they roll him away, and you don’t know if you’re ever going to see that person again.”

And so it was there, on the ramp outside the Emergency Department, that Evans had to say goodbye to Lubrano.

“That’s when it gets tough,” she said.

It would get tougher, for her and Lubrano both.

The day after he was dropped off, Lubrano – who says he really doesn’t even remember going into the hospital – was moved to an intensive-care unit at STHS dedicated to COVID care. The day after that, he was put on a ventilator to help him breathe while giving his lungs a chance to heal.

At one point, the virus triggered a heart attack. His doctors began preparing Evans for the worst.

Meanwhile, as she fought off her own COVID symptoms at home, Evans could do little but worry. And that’s one of the real cruelties of COVID-19: As hard as it is on the bodies of those suffering from it, the isolation it requires is emotionally agonizing for their loved ones.

Evans took comfort, however, in the fact that – just as they were there for Lubrano – the hospital staff was there for her, doing what they could to connect her to Lubrano however they could.

“A lot of hospitals would only allow two calls,” Evans said. “(But) I could call them four, five times a day – 2 o’clock in the morning, when I was just fretting. I would call and they’d pull up everything, the chart, they’d tell me how he was doing, whether he was stable. ….

“I can’t tell you the gratitude (we have) for these nurses, these doctors. Dr. (Jennifer) Gonzalez would talk to me for 20, 25 minutes, just filling me in on everything. If I had any questions, she wouldn’t hesitate to explain things to me. That doesn’t usually happen.”

When she called to talk to Lubrano, even before he was lucid, the nurses would hold his hand while she spoke over the phone or used the Facetime app to “visit” with him electronically.

In fact, that’s one of the reasons those nurses hold such a special place in Lubrano’s heart. On the day he sat down to talk about his experience, he wore on the front of his shirt -- right over his heart -- a St. Benedict Medal gifted to him by one of them.

Both he and Evans get choked up talking about the compassion the nurses at St. Tammany Health System have shown -- and continue to show.

In addition to regular visits from the hospital’s Home Health team, his nurses from back in the ICU and the COVID unit have written to him since he got home, just to check up on him and to let him know they’re still on Team Lubrano.

“The nurses are my angels,” Lubrano said. “Doctors are great. Doctors do what they do. They’re very smart people. But the nurses – you get that personal feeling.”

He reads off their names, eager to thank them: Olivia, Sydney, Sharon, Kim, Courtney, Christy, Brittany. There are others he’s sure he’s forgetting, but he’s grateful to every one of them for their dedication, and so is Evans.

“We have so much faith,” Evans said. “Ray was a Eucharistic minister. I have strong faith -- and when we saw what the nurses did, oh, my gosh, your God comes back to you in so many ways through them.”

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Visit STPH.org/COVID-19  for the latest information on coronavirus in St. Tammany Parish.