SAN DIEGO _ When he awoke in a hospital bed on April 2, Don Udan immediately grabbed his smartphone to check what was going on in the world.
Thirty-seven COVID-related deaths? More than 1,100 confirmed cases? And that was just in San Diego County. A deadly outbreak was growing in New York City.
It was a shock, given that there were only 37 positive tests reported and no one had died in his home city when doctors put him on a ventilator on March 15.
The 32-year-old certified nursing assistant, who worked at a local nursing home, said he started fighting a stubborn fever in early March, landing in the emergency department at Sharp Memorial Hospital on March 14 when breathing problems left him in need of an oxygen mask.
Just one day later, he was in intensive care, a breathing tube down his throat, as a mechanical ventilator filled and emptied his lungs inflamed by COVID-19.
It took nearly three weeks on the breathing machine, a team of intensivists regularly turning his body to shift the fluid pooled in his lungs to minimize permanent damage, before anyone felt comfortable taking him off the machine helping him breath.
Sitting on the edge of his bed on Memorial's seventh floor days before he finally went home on Tuesday evening, Udan said his memories of that time in twilight are mercifully blank. What he knows of what he went through during those 18 days are what his caregivers have shared with him.
"When I woke up, I didn't remember anything," Udan said. "I found out a lot of people were praying and rooting for me."
Even when the most dangerous part of the journey has passed, three weeks in a hospital bed leaves a person thin and weak.
Waking a day after April Fool's Day, the joke was clearly a cruel one. Regaining consciousness was a major victory that revealed how much soul-grinding rehab work was waiting on the other side. He would need to spend as much time regaining his strength as he did under sedation.
Having now worked with several COVID-19 patients with long intensive care stays, physical therapist Justina Soltren said the virus tends to zero out endurance reserves, leaving those who make it through the gauntlet of illness nearly as weak as newborns. It was no different for Udon.
"At first, he needed a lot of help just to sit up at the edge of the bed and just balance himself and stay upright," she said. "All of the little things we do every day, we don't realize how much energy they actually take."
At first, just a few steps with a walker was all the pair could manage, working together. Supplemental oxygen was often still necessary as his lungs gradually recovered from the out-of-control inflammation that put him on the ventilator.
Gradually, incrementally, he has shed much of the help, undergoing the most significant test of his rebuilt endurance Friday when several hospital workers pushed him on a wheelchair through a double set of doors at the end of his hallway at Memorial and into the medical tower's stairwell.
The challenge was clear: make it back down a half flight and back up again, and his path out of the hospital would be the clearest it had ever been.
What would have been an afterthought only a month ago verged toward Everest. Going down, his physical therapist at his side in mask, gown, goggles and gloves, was a little shaky but relatively quick. Coming back up took a bit more time and encouragement.
"Come on, come on, you've got this," Soltren said, staying at his side but just a bit behind to backstop any potential fall.
But gravity did not prevail. Determination shining in his eyes, and his walker forgotten in his room, he willed his legs to push through the incremental insult until he made it back to the top.
Arriving on the landing, clearly winded but not gasping for breath, he still had enough left to walk the hallway back to his room after a wistful glance out over the city through a large window at the end of the unit.
Back in his room after his toughest workout up to that point, the thin man sitting on the bed said his lung capacity didn't seem too diminished despite the recent visit from a virus that has now killed more than 170,000 people worldwide.
Waking up when he did, and spending more than two weeks in rehab, Udon has had plenty of time to let the relentless daily toll of the pandemic wash over him. Sitting where he's sitting and having experienced what he has experienced, he said, makes the news, with its never-ending focus on ever-increasing death tolls, feel a little one-sided.
He wants for everyone to see that people are beating this thing with the help of brave medical teams.
"There is hope, and everything is not dark," he said.
Remember, though, that his is a cautionary tale. Having no idea how he got infected, Udon said those out in the world who are getting tired of the current social restrictions should see his experience as proof that everyone is at risk.
"Before this, I felt like I was invincible, I was healthy, I wasn't scared. Next thing you know, I'm fighting for my life," he said.
Coming back has been all the more difficult because no visitors, not even family, are allowed to come to the bedside to offer their encouragement. For weeks, his only contact with family has been on his smartphone. Those words helped a lot, but Udon said he has been awed by the amount of love sent his way by his health care workers who, he later learned, even danced in the hallway outside his room when it came time for him to finally wake up. They also tend to stop by and celebrate those little milestones, whether it's setting aside a walker or finally climbing those stairs.
"You know, they're not scared of being close to a patient like me and catching it," he said. "My family can't visit me, but they treat me like family."
Some, like respiratory therapist Malika Wright, were with him daily when he didn't even know it. Wright said Udon was her first ventilated COVID-19 patient. Unable to visit him upstairs on the hospital's progressive care unit, Wright said she still thinks of him daily and has cherished every morsel of news about his recovery.
In the end, she said, what the public should see is a community around each person who gets discharged after conquering COVID-19. This is everybody's victory, from the physicians to those in environmental services who take on extra risk to clean patients' rooms.
"I have a saying, 'no man is too small, and it takes the work of them all," Wright said.
It's a culture, Udon said, that makes him want to return to school, hopefully becoming a registered nurse and working with the sickest patients.
"I've been inspired to help people like they helped me," he said.
