COVID-19 survivor’s life may be changed — permanently

In the before times, before he nearly died four times from the novel coronavirus, before he spent 54 days hooked up to a ventilator, Greg Beaudoin loved to go fishing, walk his dog and hang out with his kids.

Now, almost a year since he tested positive for COVID-19, Beaudoin of Inver Grove Heights suffers permanent deficits from two strokes caused by the virus. He is blind in his left eye. He has difficulty walking, and his cognitive skills have slowed. He feels constant tingling in his hands and feet. His voice, once a lovely baritone, is now whisper-soft, one of the lingering side effects of spending almost two months with a breathing tube down his throat.

The man who loved reading Nelson DeMille, watching documentaries and cheering on the Minnesota Wild faces a laundry list of unknowns: Will he ever get to drive again? Will he be able to take his granddaughters tubing? Will he get to run the trails near his house with Bode, his beloved border collie and Australian shepherd mix? Will he be able to take his wife, Sue, on that anniversary trip to Niagara Falls this fall?

It was a year ago when the first Minnesota case of COVID-19 was confirmed. Since then, about 470,000 cases and more than 6,300 deaths in the state have been linked to the virus. More than 26,000 people have needed hospital care. For many, the effects can be a slight discomfort. For others, like Greg Beaudoin, the virus can leave them struggling to breathe in the hospital for weeks or months — and might haunt them for years to come.

Beaudoin, 59, believes he contracted COVID-19 in early April 2020 while working as a respiratory therapist at a long-term care facility in New Hope.

Working with patients on ventilators, his exposure risk was high. And as an asthmatic, Beaudoin knew he had to be extra careful.

Supplies of personal protective equipment were limited at the time, however, and when Beaudoin’s only face mask ripped one day, there wasn’t another one available to him.

“But a couple of people were in dire need, so I went in to help,” he said.

Four days later, Beaudoin started experiencing shortness of breath, fever and fatigue.

“It just escalated,” said his wife, Sue Beaudoin. “Being a respiratory therapist, he knew his oxygen levels were dropping and that he needed to go in.”

Sue Beaudoin drove her husband to Woodwinds Hospital in Woodbury, where he was tested for the novel coronavirus. Three days later, on April 12, his results came back positive. It was Easter Sunday.

“He started feeling a little bit better, and his levels were up from being on oxygen, too,” she said. “The hospital staff thought it was OK for him to leave, so he came home — but it wasn’t OK. It wasn’t OK at all.”

Greg Beaudoin’s condition worsened almost as soon as he got home. Sue Beaudoin called 911, and he was taken by ambulance to St. Joseph’s Hospital in St. Paul.

After struggling to breathe all night, Beaudoin was intubated early the next morning and then transferred to Bethesda M Health Fairview Hospital in St. Paul, which had been converted into a specialty care facility for COVID-19 patients.

He would not return home until July 24 — 102 days later.

Because of restrictions on visitors at Bethesda, Sue Beaudoin and the couple’s three children, Sarah, Bryan and Nick, couldn’t see him in person.

“I cannot tell you how many times I called, and they told me that they did not know whether Greg would survive,” said Sue Beaudoin, who also contracted the coronavirus but recovered after a few weeks. “He was paralyzed, sedated and on a ventilator the entire time.”

Doctors had Greg Beaudoin spend half of each day lying face-down — a position called proning — for improved oxygenation, she said.

At 6 p.m. every day, nurses would set up an iPad near him so Sue, Sarah, Bryan and Nick could FaceTime with him.

“We never missed a night,” Sue Beaudoin said. “I just talked to him about the dog, and I told him how much I loved him and whether or not I had spoken to his dad and what the weather was like. Just mundane things, just so he could hear my voice.”

Greg Beaudoin has no memory of those calls.

“He has some pretty wicked, weird memories,” Sue Beaudoin said. “He remembers not being able to breathe and, in his mind, trying to tell someone that he couldn’t breathe.”

Greg Beaudoin spent 54 days hooked up to a ventilator at Bethesda. The coronavirus attacked his gallbladder, causing his blood pressure to spike. Scans later showed he had suffered two strokes. The first one, an occipital stroke, affected his vision; the second one, in his parietal lobe, caused permanent blindness in his left eye and affected his cognitive skills and his ability to move on his left side. He also suffered from double pneumonia.

He was in a medically induced coma from April 13 until the end of May. He underwent multiple medical procedures and surgeries in May and June. One was to deal with the infection in his gallbladder. Another was to remove fluid from his lungs. Yet another, called a thoracotomy, was to scrape his lungs because the fluid inside was so thick with infection.

Each day, Sue Beaudoin kept detailed notes in a blue spiral notebook listing her husband’s ventilator settings, body temperature, secretions, sedation levels and hemoglobin levels.

Greg Beaudoin, who worked as a respiratory therapist at local hospitals before moving into patient education and chronic pulmonary disease management, said he didn’t realize how dire his condition had been until he saw how high his ventilator settings had been.

“I know what those numbers mean,” he said. “When I saw them, I knew it was bad. I knew it was very bad.”

When the thoracic surgeon came to visit Beaudoin after his last lung surgery, “he looked right at me and held my gaze for a long time,” Greg Beaudoin said. “I asked him if everything was OK, because I thought something might have gone wrong. He said, ‘You should count your blessings, because most every other person would not have survived this.’ ”

His lungs eventually started improving, but doctors “were scared to take the breathing tube out of his mouth because it had been in there so long,” Sue Beaudoin said. “They were worried everything was going to close up on him, and he wouldn’t be able to breathe.”

They operated again — a tracheotomy — so they could pull the tube out safely.

“They were so worried about airborne transmission that they didn’t want to do it,” she said. “Finally, a surgeon came forward and said, ‘I will do it.’ It was not even 36 hours later, and Greg was totally off the ventilator.”

The next week, on the afternoon of June 4, staff at Bethesda clapped and cheered as Beaudoin was wheeled out of the COVID specialty care facility; a charge nurse captured the moment on video for his family.

He was transferred to St. Joseph’s Hospital’s long-term acute care unit. It was there, later that afternoon, that he got to see Sue for the first time in two months.

“It’s a really foggy memory,” he said. “I couldn’t see through my milky eyes, and I couldn’t understand much, but some person with a soft voice came up and held my hand gently. She took my hands and said, ‘Greg, my name is Sue, and I’m your wife.’ I remember processing, ‘I have a wife, and that’s a good thing.’ I turned my head a little bit, and I could see a little bit of her profile, and I remember thinking, ‘And she’s pretty.’ That’s the truth.”

Said Sue Beaudoin: “He was still delirious.”

Sue Beaudoin, who works as a care-transitions assistant for Fairview, was working at the time as the ICU coordinator at St. Joseph’s. Her desk was one floor up from her husband’s room. Although she was granted a special dispensation to see him for an hour on June 4, she was not allowed to see him again for another two weeks.

“It was against hospital-visiting policy at that time, so I had to follow the rules,” she said.

After almost a month at St. Joseph’s, Greg Beaudoin was transferred to the Fairview Acute Rehabilitation Center in Minneapolis on July 9.

Two weeks and a day later, he headed home.

For more than a month after he got home, he could not use his hands. He experienced fatigue, insomnia and nerve pain in hands, arms and feet.

“When I got home, I couldn’t see, I couldn’t hear, I couldn’t think,” he said. “I couldn’t tie my shoes. I couldn’t get dressed. I couldn’t eat food off a plate — it would go right off. It was really hard. I cannot thank Sue enough. She has had to do everything for me.”

He sees four therapists each week: an occupational therapist and a speech therapist in Woodbury, a pulmonary rehabilitation therapist in Minneapolis and a low-vision therapist in Burnsville.

Each week, he’s assigned logic problems as homework. Higher-level thinking skills — doing math problems involving division, for example — are extremely difficult now.

“It’s been hard,” he said. “I used to be the guy who would work and take care of multiple ICUs of patients on ventilators and look at their lung mechanics and give recommendations to physicians on how to better change the ventilator to help the patient. Now, I get tripped up on fourth- or fifth-grade reading.”

He said he also experienced post-traumatic stress disorder and depression after learning that he would not be able to return to work.

Fairview pulmonologists and critical-care physicians Nicole Roeder and Sakina Naqvi created the ICU Survivorship Clinic last summer to address the physical, mental and emotional challenges of patients after extended stays in a hospital ICU. It has helped, Greg Beaudoin said.

“When they leave the hospital, they don’t just plug back into their normal life like nothing happened,” Roeder said. The clinic has treated more than 60 patients. Some were in the ICU for 20 days, she said; others, for more than 90.

In addition to experiencing physical weakness, fatigue and breathing issues, patients may experience PTSD, anxiety, depression, cognitive issues and memory loss.

Most of the virtual clinic’s current patients are COVID-19 survivors like Beaudoin, Roeder said. “We see many patients like him experiencing residual effects,” she said.

“One of the things with COVID that has humbled us as physicians and providers is how unpredictable it is. I can’t really identify a pattern of, this person is going to do very well, this person isn’t.”

Especially challenging is not being able to tell patients “when or if they are going to be 100 percent improved,” she said.

Beaudoin knows he will never completely recover.

One strange side effect of COVID was the loss of most of his thin, blonde-brown hair — a reaction to the physiological and emotional stress brought on by the virus.

When his hair grew back, it came in “100 percent thicker and almost black,” Sue Beaudoin said. “When the body has to fight something like that and is working so hard to keep him alive, everything else gets put on the back burner.”

Before COVID, Greg Beaudoin took Bode out trail running every night at a park near their house. While Beaudoin was gone, Bode either stayed in Greg’s bedroom or lay by the side door waiting for him, Sue Beaudoin said.

Beaudoin gets teary when he talks about how much Sarah, Bryan and Nick have done for him over the past year. Nick, who works as a physician assistant, sat in on every call with the doctors. Sarah pushed to have her father twice treated with convalescent plasma, blood plasma taken from patients who had recovered from COVID, and started a GoFundMe fundraising site. Bryan mowed the yard, brought suppers and redid the couple’s patio so Beaudoin could sit outside with Bode.

“We could not have done it without them,” he said. “They have been such a source of comfort and strength.”

Another source of comfort and strength has been his faith. The Beaudoins attend Good Shepherd Lutheran Church in Inver Grove Heights. His favorite Bible verse is Jeremiah 29:11: “ ‘For I know the plans I have for you,’ declares the Lord, ‘plans to prosper you and not to harm you, plans to give you hope and a future.’ ”

“Pastor Leesa (Soderlind) has just said, ‘You are blessed to be here,’ ” Greg Beaudoin said. “I take it that it was meant to happen, and that is why I survived. God must have a higher purpose for me.”

Sue Beaudoin is terrified her husband will be re-infected; he is not scheduled to be vaccinated until the end of the month.

She said she gets upset when she sees people congregating who are not practicing physical distancing or wearing masks. And don’t get her started on people who say they won’t get vaccinated.

“Why, when you have this available, why wouldn’t you do it?” she said. “Just do it, and help mankind to get over this. Think about your loved ones. Do it for them. If you don’t want to for the stranger on the street corner, at least do it for your 80-year-old grandmother.”

Said Greg Beaudoin: “If you don’t think this virus can take you out forever, faster than you know, you are wrong. It can get to you without you knowing it, and it can take you out.”

As he sat in the sun in his back yard on a recent weekday afternoon, he said it is a miracle he survived.

“I’m happy to be out here talking to you,” he said. “And I have my wife here, and my dog at my feet. Life is good.”

A GoFundMe page has been set up to help Greg and Sue Beaudoin cover ongoing medical expenses. To donate, go to https://www.gofundme.com/f/the-beaudoin-family