‘This stuff is real.’ Lexington woman had COVID-19, spent 18 days on ventilator & is now home.
Sheila Thornsberry, a Lexington physicians assistant, doesn’t remember going to the emergency room at Baptist Health Lexington two days after she was diagnosed with the novel coronavirus.
She doesn’t remember most of the next 18 days, when she was hooked to a ventilator, either.
But what she will always remember is the feeling of joy on Friday, when she was wrapped in the arms of her children and husband as she walked out of the hospital, one of the 1,501 Kentuckians who have recovered from COVID-19.
“The nurses would hold my hand, and that helped,” Thornsberry said in a telephone interview Saturday evening, “But it’s nothing like throwing your arms around your babies.”
Thornsberry, 50, had two negative coronavirus tests this week, which allowed her to see her children for the first time in six weeks.
“I’m home, I’m alive, I’m thankful and blessed,” she said.
Thornsberry, who works at a local Urgent Treatment Center, said she does not know how she contracted the virus, but she began to feel like she was coming down with a sinus infection in late March.
Then she started running a fever, and on March 30, she tested positive for coronavirus in the emergency room at the University of Kentucky.
“It felt like a flu,” she said.
Because she was not having difficulty breathing, she initially was at home after the diagnosis, secluded in her bedroom.
“I would take her food up, set it outside the door,” said her husband, Ron Thornsberry.
Then on the night of April 1, he said they were watching an episode of Grey’s Anatomy, with him downstairs and her in the upstairs bedroom. They’d been texting back and forth when Thornsberry stopped texting her husband. When he texted to ask if she’d fallen asleep, her response set them on a course that separated them for the next three weeks: “She said, ‘I’m having trouble breathing,’” he recalled.
Thornsberry rushed his wife to the emergency room at Baptist Health Lexington, where she was placed on a ventilator within about half an hour of their arrival, he said.
She spent the next 18 days in intensive care and under sedation because of the ventilator, he said.
Sheila Thornsberry said she has no memory of most of her time in the hospital.
When her husband asked her how long she thought she was on the ventilator, she guessed three days.
“The brain fog is bad,” she said.
Ron Thornsberry said Dr. Yuri Villaran, a physician at Baptist who works with critically ill patients, regularly spoke with him on Facetime, and afterward, the nursing staff would take the device to Sheila Thornsberry so that he could see and talk with her.
Sheila Thornsberry was taken off the ventilator last Sunday. Since then, her husband said, “she just has improved remarkably quick.”
“I couldn’t have asked for better care,” she said of the treament she received at the hospital.
Thornsberry said she had no major medical problems before she was struck with coronavirus, and she intends to make a full recovery.
But she said she still has a lot of recovering to do.
Thornsberry uses oxygen at night and is receiving physical therapy at home to help her recover from spending nearly a month in bed.
“I don’t have a lot of pain,” she said, aside from a sore tongue from her time on the ventilator. But she said she has “horrendous core weakness.”
“She’s doing well,” Ron Thornsberry said. “We’re just happy to have her home.”
She urged people to stay home, wear a mask if they must go out in public and seek medical treatment right away if they think they need it.
“This stuff is real,” she said. “It doesn’t discriminate.”
