My husband and I both contracted Covid-19 just before Christmas in 2020. On Christmas day we went to the hospital emergency room to seek diagnosis and treatment. I was treated and released, told to take over-the-counter flu medication but my husband was admitted to the hospital because his blood oxygen level decreased upon exertion.

The treatment they provided him in the first few days was Remdesivir even though my husband asked them about hydroxychloroquine. Of course they had him on oxygen using a nasal canula, and multiple other medications. They also administered convalescent plasma three days after admission. After 5 days on Remdesivir and being in the Covid segregated part of the hospital, he was admitted to the ICU. After 5 days in the ICU he was put on a ventilator. He was told it was imperative for his survival, so he gave consent and they did not wait for him to be able to reach me and let me know. He was put into a coma and paralyzed and put on the ventilator. After 30 days on the ventilator and his condition declining daily, he died. During this entire 40 days they did not allow any visitors, nor did they even allow people into the hospital if they were there to see a Covid patient. They had a desk set up just inside the hospital doors where they screened everyone.

I called multiple times a day to get updates and the nurses were mostly all very kind and answered my questions, but it was difficult to get a doctor to speak to me. I even went to the hospital in person and asked if the doctor would come downstairs to speak to me and give me an update, and he refused.

Nurses informed me that the only time doctors even saw him was for a couple of minutes each morning on rounds. Other than that, the doctors just relayed instructions to the nursing staff as needed.

On 2/2/2021, 39 days after admission, the hospital finally allowed me to come and see him as they said he had tested negative for Covid. So I went to see him briefly and though he was unaware of my presence, I was glad to be able to see and touch him. I was alarmed by the number of bags of IV drugs, especially because there were so many narcotics among them like morphine, fentanyl and ketamine.

Because he was Covid negative, they were going to move him to the non-Covid ICU and so I had to leave. I was told that this whole transfer did not go well. He was put on a temporary mobile ventilator, moved to another floor where the regular ICU was located, and they refused to accept him. They said he was much too ill for them and he needed to go back to the Covid ICU. So he was moved back. I have no idea how long he was on that temporary ventilator, or how long this whole bungled transfer took, but his condition deteriorated rapidly and he died that night.

The hospital contacted me when he was near death to say I could come and see him. I rushed there and was able to spend his last hour and a half of life in his room with him, although he was in such a state I doubt he had any awareness of my presence.

I felt then, and still feel today, that the rush to put him on a ventilator instead of perhaps doing a tracheostomy in order to allow him to be awake and alert while ventilated is what caused his eventual death. The ventilator and the massive amounts of drugs they had him on to keep him under and to keep him from trying to breathe on his own for 30 days eventually killed him.