CLEVELAND — Throughout this pandemic we've seen medical teams clap out COVID-19 survivors who are finally able to leave the hospital.
It took two months for one Cleveland Clinic send-off to happen, and it almost never did.
Ron Chaudry's COVID-19 battle started in May.
"At the beginning of the week I had a cough, cold, by midweek I had a fever," he remembers.
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By the end of the week, the 29-year-old had trouble breathing and checked himself into the Ashtabula County Medical Center where his situation became even worse. He doesn't remember being airlifted to the downtown Cleveland Clinic campus, but Dr. Rachel Scheraga certainly does.
"He was severly ill and only had a 50 percent chance of making it," said Dr. Scheraga, a critical care specialist with expertise in lung injury and Acute Respiratory Distress Syndrome, or ARDS.
COVID was killing Ron.
"He was extremely ill. He had COVID-19 pneumonia and Acute Respiratory Distress Syndrome or ARDS, he had very difficult time keeping his oxygen up, he was on a mechanical ventilator had a breathing tube," Dr. Scheraga said.
If that wasn't bad enough, his oxygen got so low his heart stopped.
"We had to do CPR for about an hour to get his oxygen up as much as possible," Dr. Scheraga said.
Worse, Ron's family lives in Canada and couldn't be by his side because the border is closed. Ron's care involved more than two hundred Cleveland Clinic caregivers and despite their efforts, unfortunately, many thought his end was near.
The only person who could be with him was his best friend's mom.
"She was holding my hand and she whispered in my hand 'Ron if you can hear me squeeze my hand' and I guess I squeezed her hand, I squeezed her finger and she started crying and telling the doctors look there's a sign," Ron said.
He spent a week in rehab and is now home regaining strength and still fighting the after effects of COVID.
"I had a new perspective on life and I was just like 'I gotta beat this, I gotta work hard and get back to where I was at.' Get my strength. I can't be, I'm a young guy, I still gotta lot of time so there's a lot of stuff I want to do. It's like creating a bucket list," Ron said.
That included going back to see the team that saved his life.
"I drove all the way from Ashtabula to say hi and thank you guys, you guys are like beautiful angels, guardian angels," he told the team of Clinic staff.
He hopes his story is a valuable lesson to others to take those precautions seriously.
"COVID is real, a lot of people just take it as a joke," he said. It's an experience he'll never laugh about.
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