SOUTH BEND, Ind. (AP) - As the doctors and nurses filled her room at Memorial Hospital the evening of July 20, Heidi Clear could see the worry on their faces.
She was 37 weeks pregnant, and only a couple of weeks past testing positive for COVID-19. Her most recent test, from that morning, had not yet come back.
Her blood pressure had been elevated since just before her COVID-19 diagnosis, but now she was coughing uncontrollably and her heart had developed premature ventricular contractions - extra heartbeats that disrupt its regular rhythm.
According to the monitors, her heartbeat was ping-ponging between 30 beats per minute and 120 beats per minute.
“There was a Rapid Response Team in the hall just in case my heart stopped,” Heidi said. “I’m glad I didn’t know that.”
She and her husband, Kerry, both 41, had come to the hospital the day before so her doctor could induce labor.
As the medical team responded to her heart palpitations, Heidi tried not to cry.
“They’re worried, so this is bad,” she recalled thinking. “I was pretty sure that if I got really upset, that wouldn’t be good. I tried to be calm. I felt like I was in good hands.”
The doctors decided she needed an emergency C-section and wheeled her to the operating room in the area of the hospital that had been set aside for COVID-19 patients.
Kerry, the associate pastor at Grace United Methodist Church in South Bend, sent messages to a prayer chain.
“I was sitting there, thinking, ‘Lord, help them figure out what’s going on,’” he said.
At 8:45 p.m., Heidi gave birth to Sullivan Lloyd Clear - 6 pounds, 12 ounces and 19¾ inches.
He was whisked to the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit, and Heidi was forced to remain in the COVID ward for another 24 hours so her condition could be monitored.
She knew Sullivan was healthy, she said, but being separated from her newborn “was pretty bad.” At one point in the morning hours, Heidi started to cry in the COVID ward.
“I nearly died the night before, didn’t see the baby, didn’t see my husband,” she said. “I didn’t see a doctor for a long time. … My husband wasn’t there, and I didn’t hold (Sullivan) for 24 hours.”
As of July 31, the Centers for Disease Control reported that 14,681 pregnant women had been diagnosed with COVID-19, 35 had died from it, 3,907 had been hospitalized, 181 had been admitted to the intensive care unit and 66 required mechanical ventilation.
Up until the last week of June, Heidi’s pregnancy had been as complication-free as her first two.
But then her blood pressure spiked to 150/100 (normal is 120/80) with only five or six weeks to go before she expected to give birth.
Heidi suspects COVID-19 gave her hypertension, but, in reality, little is still known about how the disease affects pregnancy.
In all, four of the five members of the blended family in the Clear household - two adult children are no longer at home - eventually tested positive for COVID-19.
Morgan McGowan, 17, developed a fever on June 28, went for a test and received her positive diagnosis six days later, on July 3.
Kerry’s fever started June 30, and Heidi’s the next day. It took six more days for their test results to come back.
Gilbert Clear, 13, began to show symptoms and tested positive as the others were near the end of their recoveries. Abigail Clear, 17, tested negative.
The Clears don’t know how or where they contracted COVID-19, although Morgan, Abigail and Gilbert spent time at the pool in their South Bend neighborhood. Other than that, family members went to work and the grocery store and otherwise stayed home.
When they did leave home, Kerry said, they took the recommended precautions of wearing masks and distancing themselves from others.
For now, one of the few certainties about COVID-19 is that it strikes people differently - from mild symptoms to severe ones that require a ventilator. To varying degrees, the Clear family members experienced many of the most common symptoms: fever, muscle aches, fatigue, and loss of smell and taste.
At first, Kerry said, in addition to the fever, COVID-19 felt like seasonal allergies - headaches, congestion, a runny nose, sore throat and “painful” eyes. Then, the fatigue - “crazy fatigue,” as Heidi described it - afflicted all of them.
“You wake up and think you feel good, but just standing up is exhausting,” she said. “To think is really difficult. I ended up losing my sense of smell about three days in. My blood pressure stayed 150/100 until about three days ago.”
Kerry recalls his temperature hitting 99.7, while Morgan topped 102. Morgan also developed a rash that’s more common in young people with COVID-19. Gilbert, a swimmer, has regained most of his energy but still can’t do a full workout.
Kerry experienced chest pains - both muscular as well as heart palpitations - and cognitive issues, including forgetting words and, once, pouring his coffee into a serving of stir-fry without knowing he was doing it.
“My heart is still skipping beats even now,” Kerry said. “I can still sense some hesitation in words that wasn’t there before. … The fatigue gets better each day. Those are the three symptoms that have lingered even though I’ve tested negative.”
Immediately after her positive test result, the only changes to Heidi’s prenatal care were increased blood pressure monitoring and the move of her appointments from Michiana Obstetrics and Gynecology, where her doctor practices, to Memorial Hospital, where she could be isolated from patients without COVID-19.
Heidi worried about passing the disease to Sullivan and “about what kind of care I would get, because they want to keep it contained.”
Sometimes, Kerry said, they still saw Heidi’s doctor in person, but he talked to them on the phone more frequently.
“It was kind of a lonely affair,” he said, “because they didn’t want anybody coming into the room.”
Heidi’s doctor wanted to induce labor after she was diagnosed, in her 35th week, but he agreed to monitor her blood pressure to see if it would decrease on its own.
“They made me promise not to have a stroke,” Heidi said, “so I didn’t have one.”
By Week 37, however, her doctor arranged to begin inducing labor July 19.
“That was going pretty slowly, because he wasn’t ready and I wasn’t ready,” Heidi said. “Then my heart starting doing a pre-beat and then a beat. … Within 30 minutes, I was on an operating table.”
Looking back on the experience, Kerry said, the most frustrating part about COVID-19 may be how little doctors know about it yet and the lack of an effective treatment.
“They said there’s nothing they can do about this unless we can’t breathe,” he said. “I think the most frightening thing is to be told, ‘Yeah, you have all these symptoms, but we can’t treat them. Short of you not being able to breathe, there’s nothing we can do.’”
The political battles that have erupted around COVID-19 - about its origin, over face masks, about whether it’s no worse than the flu - also frustrate Kerry.
“We can’t forget that it’s real people this is affecting,” he said. “It’s more than a positive and negative. It’s a change for every person who gets it. Their lives have the potential to be changed, and it’s a lot more than 1% of the population. … We have to deal with it, and it’s not the common flu.”
But the Clears also keep their experience in perspective: Sullivan is healthy, and so is Heidi.
The COVID-19 test that she took the day of her surgery came back negative. Sullivan also tested negative, and he has added 5 ounces between his birth and one-week checkup.
“Some people walk out of there without a baby,” Heidi said, “so I’m grateful.”
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Source: South Bend Tribune
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