Huard on the road to recovery from COVID, warns others not to be complacent
Long-time islander and registered nurse Martha Huard has taken COVID seriously since the pandemic began. Receiving all of her COVID-19 vaccinations, booster shots, making certain to avoid contact with anyone having the virus, and following CDC guidelines, such as washing her hands and wearing a facemask, have become a part of her normal routine.
No one was more surprised when she contracted COVID than she was, especially when her health took a turn for the worse. Having had 45 years experience in medicine encouraged Huard to do her part by volunteering to give COVID vaccinations, in an attempt to help stop the pandemic.
Huard explained that she is very familiar with mRNA technology, since it has been bused in oncology for a very long time.
“I did it to protect the most at-risk and to try to get things back to normal,” Huard said.
Generally, Huard said, she chooses to eat outside, but for the first time in a very long time she and her husband ate inside at a crowded restaurant, where she believes she contracted COVID-19. Three days later, she said, she started feeling ill and had a 101.5 fever. She tested with a home-kit and said the positive result was immediate, likely due to an overwhelming load of virus. Suffering mostly body-aches, headache and fever, Huard said it wasn’t that bad until day 5.
“I started having a little bit of shortness of breath with exertion. I live in a stilt-house so going up the stairs left me a little winded and that worsened pretty quickly over a 24-hour period — to the point where I couldn’t walk to the bathroom without being totally out of breath. I couldn’t lay down flat. I had to sit up, but when I was sitting perfectly still, my lungs were totally clear — no congestion and no real wheezing,” Huard said.
Symptoms that failed to present as pneumonia led Huard to the conclusion that this was out of the ordinary. Within three hours, she said, she couldn’t breathe and it was then that she realized she was in big trouble.
“I was gasping, pulling, sucking for air. I couldn’t get the air in or out. By the time I got to the hospital my oxygen saturation was in the 80s. Normal is 99 to100,” Huard said.
When a patient gets to an oxygen level in the low 80s, they are put on a ventilator, she explained. The hospital was so crowded at that point, she said, they had moved emergency triage out into the parking lot, where approximately 75 people awaited treatment.
“People were moaning and screaming — it was bad,” Huard said.
Huard had cardiac symptoms, she described as chest and arm pressure, so she was blood tested for a heart attack, which came back with elevated enzymes and oxygen levels in the 80s. The CT scan, she said, showed a massive pulmonary embolism.
“I had thrown a blood clot to my lungs and the blood couldn’t make it through my lungs so it was stuck up in the right side of my heart and couldn’t get to my lungs and back to the left side of my heart,” Huard said.
Huard was suffering elevated blood pressure, as her heart worked to get blood past the clot in her heart. After anti-coagulants were administered, along with oxygen and blood pressure medication, she said she began to improve.
“One of the reasons COVID is so different, even though it can be flu-like symptoms, is that it causes a massive inflammatory response in different parts of your body and in different ways than other viruses do, and what it attaches to is found throughout your body, not just in your lungs and not just in one place. It’s your kidneys, your heart — it’s anywhere,” Huard said.
Each person’s particular response is different, she said, depending on where they might have susceptibility or where the virus concentrates. One of these responses, as was in her case, she said, is to begin forming blood clots.
“I started forming a clot in response to the inflammation. It formed in my leg and broke off and then traveled up to my lungs and lodged in my lungs. For some people it can be really mild, but if you know you have an underlying condition — if you have respiratory disease or if you’re asthmatic, or immune suppressed from cancer treatment or any auto-immune disease, it puts you more at risk and you need to take extra precautions,” Huard said.
Huard further warns that anyone who begins to feel worse after a number of days or if symptoms suddenly change, this could mean the body has chosen another route to fight off the virus and they should seek medical attention immediately.
“If you know you’ve been exposed, at least give it five days before you put other people at risk and expose somebody else. Get vaccinated and continue with common sense and care about your neighbor,” Huard said.
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