How COVID-19 changed one vaccine skeptic’s mind

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Thursday, October 21, 2021

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How COVID-19 changed one vaccine skeptic’s mind

Mike Scott, mscott@stph.org

St. Tammany Health System Patient Navigation Resource Coordinator Rebecca Currie, front, credits her supervisors at St. Tammany Cancer Center, a campus of Ochsner Medical Center -- including from left, Lindsay Gomez, Paula Day and cancer center administrator Jack Khashou -- for their understanding through her months-long bout with COVID-19. (Photo by Tim San Fillippo /STHS)

Rebecca Currie used to consider herself an anti-vaxxer.

The 29-year-old St. Tammany Health System patient navigation resource coordinator also thought she was too young to get a bad case of COVID-19. She thought she was strong enough to weather anything it threw her way.

Thankfully, she was right on that second point. But only barely – and only with some significant medical intervention.

Now, still feeling the effects of COVID-19 more than three months after first contracting it, she’s changed her mind about vaccines – and she hopes her story helps other skeptics change theirs as well.

“There’s so much information and so much knowledge available to me, but being so stubborn and hard-headed, it took that case of COVID for me to realize that this vaccine isn’t something you can do without,” Currie said recently, reflecting on her extended COVID ordeal.

It all started in July when Currie and her husband – neither of whom had received the COVID-19 vaccine – both started feeling ill. His symptoms were mostly suggestive of a head cold, but hers were a little worse.

Currie, a patient navigation resource coordinator at St. Tammany Cancer Center, a campus of Ochsner Medical Center, thought maybe she had a nasty sinus infection. She even got a COVID test, which came back negative.

But as time went by, things kept getting worse. And worse.

Then, a few days in, it was like a switch flipped.  

“One minute I was fine,” she said. “The next, I couldn’t see. My head hurt so bad my eyes were blurring over. I had to close my eyes, and as soon as I did, I got super dizzy.”

Her temperature was normal. Still, she didn’t feel normal, so she went to St. Tammany Health System’s Express Care walk-in clinic in Covington. In the five to 10 minutes it took her to get there, her temperature had risen to 99.9 degrees. A second test showed what the first one didn’t: She had COVID.

STHS's Rebecca Currie had always been uncomfortable taking vaccines. Then she got COVID-19 and realized how wrong she had been. 'My message would be that preventative care is worth your life and the life of your loved ones,' she 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 his you.' (Photo by Tim San Fillippo / STHS)

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.

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