Editor’s note: We asked readers on Facebook a few weeks ago if any local people who have been diagnosed with COVID-19 (67 of them since March) would share their stories so that we could understand how it is affecting people differently. Two weeks ago, three readers consented to share their stories anonymously. Last week, Brown Countian Dan Pardue offered to share his as well. If you have had or currently have COVID-19 and would like to tell your story, please email [email protected].
Dan Pardue does not remember at least four weeks of his life this spring. In March and April, he was battling COVID-19, hooked up to a ventilator in St. Francis hospital.
“I was completely out of it. I don’t even know how long it was from the time I left ICU on the vent and went into a regular room. I don’t know many days passed in between there. It’s all a big blur to me,” he said last week.
Pardue, 73, first became sick toward the end of March. At that time, the Centers for Disease Control and the World Health Organization were not recommending masks for everyone, but rather were encouraging everyone to wash their hands and keep their distance from others.
Pardue said he was taking precautions by washing his hands often and only going to work, then home. He made one stop at a gas station in Franklin before he fell ill, which is where he believes he caught the coronavirus.
Johnson County was one of the early hot spots for positive cases in March.
“I truly believe I got it off the pump handle. That’s the only place I stopped. I didn’t go anywhere else. None of my friends had it, none of my circle had it and none of my family had it,” Pardue said.
At that time, anyone who had symptoms of the virus had to wait 10 days before they could get tested because of a shortage of testing supplies. On the 10th day, Pardue’s wife drove him to St. Francis for the test and brought him back home. But he wouldn’t be home for long.
“I don’t even remember coming home from that test,” he said.
“That night I tossed and turned and hallucinated. She tried to get me in the truck to go to the hospital like at 5 a.m. the next morning. I kept saying, ‘No. We have to have the results. We have to have the results.’ Finally, she got tired of messing with me and she called 911.”
An ambulance rushed him back to St. Francis where he was immediately put on a ventilator.
“I was very, very sick,” he said.
Pardue was on the ventilator for 14 days and was at St. Francis for 20 days total as he recovered.
While on the ventilator, he had even more complications, including catching pneumonia and his heart going into atrial fibrillation, where the upper heart chambers beat out of coordination with the lower chambers.
After being released and put into a regular hospital room, Pardue was transferred to the Indiana Rehabilitation Hospital in Indianapolis where he spent an additional 20 days building his strength back up.
“When I got there (to the rehabilitation hospital) I could only take five steps on a walker and I had to sit down. My lungs were shot,” he said.
“When I left there I could do about 500 steps without having to sit down. I was in a lot better shape than I was. Now, today, I am walking anywhere between 8,000 and 12,000 steps a day just to rehabilitate myself and get my strength back.”
After arriving at the rehabilitation hospital, Pardue could not move his right leg, so doctors ran scans to see if he had had a stroke.
“I had a hematoma sitting on my right groin area that was about four inches across. That was causing my nerves to not allow me to lift my leg — at least, that’s what they thought at the time. In doing all of my exercises and walking, I started to be able to lift my leg. We determined it was a muscle problem and not a nerve problem.
“Then, they gave me another CAT scan four weeks ago. They called me and they said, ‘We think that hematoma is a mass, and we want you to see an oncologist.’ More bad news,” he said.
He’s since learned that it doesn’t appear to be cancer.
Before he was sick, Pardue had no underlying health issues and kept active by participating in bass fishing tournaments and hunting. He also worked part-time at Pickett Equipment Parts in Franklin, handling small parts and putting them into inventory.
“I would work three days a week just to help them out and it gave me something to do — kind of pay for my fishing and hunting habits.”
However, spates of dizziness and balance problems have kept him from returning back to work more than four months after catching the virus.
“They are saying that (being dizzy) is one of the side effects of COVID-19. They don’t know if it will go away or it won’t go away. It doesn’t happen every day, but it happens enough that it made me go to the doctor to check my blood pressure, my sugar and all of that. She said, ‘It could just be a side effect of COVID-19 because that is one of the side effects.’
“It’s been a long, four-month battle. … They still think that the antibodies are not staying with us COVID-19 people that we can get it again. It’s not like the flu. We can get it again. I haven’t been in a restaurant, a store or anything since March 23 and don’t intend to go in any. My wife does the shopping and while she is shopping I am walking. I walk outside. I am just scared to death to get it again.”
Pardue said he wanted to share his experience with COVID-19 after reading the stories of three other residents last week who tested positive with more mild symptoms, “not to take anything away” from their experiences, but to show that it can be more serious.
“My case is a lot worse. People need to know that it’s not just the flu. I wear my mask when I do go out in public to the doctor’s office. … There are so many people who have conspiracy theories, like it’s a hoax. There is a lot of politics involved in it, I am sure, but it is real. It is definitely real. It does not discriminate.”
When Pardue first started feeling ill, he had a fever and body aches. “It was just a lot of the same symptoms you would get with the flu, only they were like tenfold. I just hurt all over. I had the fever. I did not have any throwing up or diarrhea or anything like that, but it wouldn’t go away. I was pretty sure I had the COVID,” he said.
“It’s probably a good thing my wife got mad at me and called 911, because two more days here at the cabin, I might have been dead. … When I was on the vent, my kidneys were only functioning five percent. All my doctors that I’ve seen since then, my heart doctor and everybody else, said, ‘You do not realize how close to being in the ground you were.’ It’s scary. It scares you.
“If I had not been a 73-year-old active outdoorsman, all my doctors say I would be a dead man. If I had been some 73-year-old guy that was retired, watched a lot of TV and sat around, I would be dead right now. … I was lucky to be healthy.”
Along with the dizzy spells, Pardue still has fatigue. “I tried to go back to work a couple weeks ago. I can only work about five hours and I’m done. I still have the fatigue part of it, but the more I walk, the better it is for my lungs, my heart and my muscles. … I told my buddy, ‘Look this scares me to death. I don’t feel comfortable. Just take me off the payroll and I’ll see you in six or eight weeks if it’s better. If it’s not better, I’ll see you at the first of January.’
“Three days ago, I walked 16,000 steps. I am working hard to get back to full strength. You absolutely have to do the therapy. The therapy and the working at it is a must or I might have relapsed back into something. I don’t know.”
Pardue’s 49-year-old wife also tested positive, but she had no idea she had it.
“I ended up giving it to my wife. … She quarantined for 14 days. She went back and got a negative test. She started back to work, but that was when everyone was shutting down, so she was off for another three or four weeks. …
“She had no symptoms: no fever, no anything. She was one of those asymptomatic people. … That’s the scary part about this. There is a lot of people walking around that have COVID and they don’t know they have COVID because they are not sick. Then when they go to visit grandma in the nursing home or their parents, then they get sick. It’s not their fault, but I am one of those people that thinks everyone should get tested. I really do.
“Not taking away their rights, you know, the way people argue over this mask mandate, I just think for their safety and their family’s safety, it would behoove them to go get a test.”
Pardue and his wife were apart for six weeks as he recovered.
“It was tough, because she couldn’t come to visit. She had to handle everything around here, keep my friends and my family aware because they (the hospital) actually called the minister and my family, that’s how close I was. They called my wife and told her they better be getting ready. They definitely did not think I was going to make it.”
Slowly, but surely Pardue proved the doctors wrong as he worked to get stronger at the rehabilitation hospital. It was not until almost two weeks of being there that he began to feel like he would survive the virus.
“The worst part about it was I could have died and not ever talk to my family again. That’s a bad feeling. That absolutely (motivated me). There’s no question about it. I couldn’t see anybody again ever. That would have been horrible.”
Pardue ended up losing 23 pounds while he was hospitalized, including a lot of muscle mass.
After 20 days in the rehabilitation hospital, the physical therapists and nurses lined the hallways to clap for Pardue as he made his way out to the song, “Celebration.”
“Then, at the end of that little hallway, there my wife stood outside next to the car. It just got quiet. You get upset. You’re glad to see her, but you’re still upset,” he said.
Another motivator for Pardue as he recovered was to get well enough to sit in his tree stand to hunt deer beginning Oct. 1.
“I still have dizziness and I don’t have real good balance. I can move around, I can drive and I can get around. But every once in a while, I’ll catch myself getting a little tipsy and I have to steady myself up,” he said.
“Be safe. Wear your mask. It’s not taking your rights away, it’s just taking care of somebody else’s health, like your mom, your dad or your grandparents. Do it for them if you don’t want to do it for yourself. … People get locked in on the masks and they don’t realize you don’t have to wear it outside unless you’re not going to be socially distancing yourself. I say, wear your mask just to be safe. It’s not giving up any rights. It don’t take that long to put it on and take it off. You may save somebody’s life.”
