Rebooting Your Brain

CHAPTER 1My Reboot

On November 11, 2021, I was diagnosed with COVID‐19. At first it was like a mild cold, and then I experienced increasing fatigue until it got hard to will myself to move. By November 15, I knew the virus was attacking my lungs as breathing was getting more difficult. Still, I felt it would work its way through my system and I would be fine. On Sunday, November 21, my wife, Michelle, recognized that things had progressed and not in a good way. (Candidly, she saved my life on that day.)

She took me to a local urgent care facility; I was their first patient, standing by the door when they opened for the morning. They took me to an exam room where a doctor checked the oxygen saturation in my blood and told me I was suffering from acute hypoxic respiratory failure. Basically, my lung function was so low that it was starving my cells, organs, and brain of oxygen; as a result, they were beginning to shut down and die. Without medical intervention, I would have been lucky to survive the day.

Within five minutes they had me in the back of an ambulance and were rushing me to the hospital. Little did I know that I was about to start the most harrowing, overwhelming, and frightening process of my life.

For the next five days, machines helped me to breathe while I laid in a bed attached to electrodes, IV lines, and monitoring equipment. On my third day in the hospital, despite the medical team's best efforts, things had not improved. I was being given the highest level ...