After 95 Days Hospitalized, A Coronavirus Doubter Now Believes

LEXINGTON, NC — Shanderick Dorsey admits there was a time not all that long ago when he believed the coronavirus wasn't real. At 18, and with his whole life seemingly still ahead of him, the energetic teenager whose friends call “Shammy” couldn’t envision living with an illness that could strip him of his ability to walk or talk, or that would lead doctors to tell his mother there was a real possibility her son wouldn’t live to see 19.

Dorsey certainly couldn’t envision living that life — until he did.

For 95 days, Dorsey was confined to a bed at Wake Forest Baptist Hospital in Winston-Salem, where he was rushed last April and where he remained in a coma for nearly two months. In the weeks before, Dorsey had been confined to his home in Lexington because his mother, Yateria Thomas, decided it wasn’t safe for her family to leave the house because the rate confirmed cases of the coronavirus were popping up around North Carolina.

At the time, Thomas was the only one who would leave the house to go back and forth for work and to get necessities for her children, hell-bent on protecting them from the global pandemic that was gripping the country but that seemingly no one around her was taking seriously.

Dorsey didn’t mind being relegated to his house, where his friends were able to come and go. Given his young age and the fact that he knew the people he was interacting with, Dorsey didn’t figure there was any way the coronavirus would ever find him. Until it did.

Less than a month after the pandemic began, Dorsey suddenly wasn't feeling like himself. He could barely move around without experiencing shortness of breath. Soon, Dorsey — who suffers from asthma and sleep apnea — began coughing up large amounts of blood. On April 12, Thomas took her son to a local hospital, where doctors said he was having a heart attack and that he had double pneumonia. Further blood tests also showed that Dorsey had contracted the coronavirus despite all of the precautions his mother had put in place.

“I didn’t believe it was real,” Thomas told Patch in a Zoom interview on Friday. “It was a shock and I was wondering, ‘How could that have even happened?’ So when they called and said he had COVID, I wondered, how could that be?”

Without realizing it, Thomas had herself contracted the COVID-19 virus and had brought it into her home. But because she showed no symptoms of the virus, she continued to go about her daily business, working each day before returning home to her family. Now diagnosed himself and hospitalized in Winston-Salem, where he had been transferred due to the severity of his condition, Dorsey braced for what he figured would be a 14-day stay, never believing his condition would worsen. Until it did.

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While his mother had seemingly taken every precaution to protect herself and her children from the coronavirus, Dorsey acknowledges he didn’t take the pandemic seriously. Now, in the hospital, Dorsey began to wonder why COVID-19 had chosen him. At times, his newfound reality became too much to handle and the tears came without him knowing that, in a matter of days, his condition would become much worse than he or anyone ever imagined.

The days that followed remain a blur to this day. Rather than getting better, Dorsey’s health quickly deteriorated. Because of coronavirus restrictions, Thomas was unable visit her son in the hospital, forcing her to rely on the 25 or 30 times a day she phoned the hospital searching for answers about her son’s condition. As the virus settled into Dorsey’s body, his oxygen level plummeted and his blood pressure also dropped dramatically. Doctors informed Thomas that her son would be put on an ECHMO machine — a heart-lung device that provides prolonged cardiac and respiratory support to patients. A tube transports blood from the body to the machine, which then provides oxygen back into the body and allows the heart and lungs to rest.

Dorsey, who had gone into a coma days after he arrived in Winston-Salem, remained hooked up to the ECMO machine for a bit more than a month. The constant life support was needed as Dorsey’s body wasn’t reacting the way it needed to, which made the procedure necessary to his survival, Thomas said Friday. For nearly two months, Dorsey’s day-to-day life became an extended roller coaster ride for his family. Like her son, Thomas found herself struggling and facing levels of hopelessness like she had never experienced.

“Ain’t nobody but God who brought me through this,” Thomas said Friday. "(At the time), I was trying to figure out, 'How can it be my baby?' I didn’t understand, because he’s a good kid overall. I would just sit there, and I couldn’t take it all in. I had moments when I broke down. It was really hard, but I had a support system that was really there for me.”

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Thomas and Dorsey’s father were finally allowed to go see their son, as doctors feared he wouldn’t survive. But the first visit didn’t come until after weeks of Thomas calling the hospital every hour on the hour and then some, constantly checking in with hospital officials and doctors for updates on her son’s health. While hospital regulations still didn't allow for regular visitors, doctors wanted to give Dorsey's parents a chance to say goodbye while their son still had life, although they couldn't guarantee how much longer that would last.

“Dorsey really became part of our ICU family,” Ben Boger, a certified nursing assistant at Wake Forest Baptist said in story posted on Wake Forest Baptist Hospital's website. “We went through so many emotions with his family – he’d have days of improvement and then he’d have days of setbacks. I remember putting my hand on his chest a few times and telling him, ‘You got this man.’ At times, our staff was all he had, due to the limited visitor restrictions, and we really rallied behind him."

It wasn’t until May 7 — just two days before her birthday — when Thomas was finally permitted to see her son in person. With her son still in a coma, Thomas sat by his bedside and prayed after doctors warned it may be the final time she would see Dorsey alive. Unsure of her son’s future, Thomas continued to pray, asking God to somehow spare her son’s life. Within a few days of her first visit, Dorsey’s condition improved, which provided Thomas hope that her faith was being rewarded. But when Dorsey had yet another setback, doctors called Thomas and Dorsey’s father back — this time implore them to remove Shanderick from life support.

For every instance of Dorsey showing improvement, more hardships would set in again, leading doctors to fear for the worse. Her faith unshaken, however, Thomas refused to remove her son from life support. Even though Dorsey had emerged from the coma by this point, he was still heavily sedated and Thomas could sense he was responding to her prayers and what she believed was God’s hand.

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By the first of June, Dorsey — who spent his 19th birthday in the hospital — was slowly responding but was unable to speak or walk. Doctors eventually inserted a valve that assisted with his speech. He remembers asking a doctor at the end of June how long he had been hospitalized and can remember breaking down when the doctor replied he had been there for 84 days.

He couldn't remember many of those days and weeks — and, even now, struggles to grasp everything he had endured. Dorsey knows he likely wouldn't be here without the care and concern of the medical professionals who watched over him and decorated his room with balloons for a birthday he doesn't fully recollect.

Before being released July 17 after 95 days of being hospitalized, Dorsey went through physical therapy to learn how to walk again. With his mother assisting him getting out of bed, Dorsey navigated his room and other spaces with the use of a walker. On a daily basis, before being allowed to return home, Dorsey told doctors he believed he would make more progress if he could leave the hospital, which took an emotional toll on his mood at a times.

“They were trying to get me to work with physical therapy, and I didn’t want to,” Dorsey told Patch Friday. “I was like, ‘If y’all let me go home, I promise y’all I’ll start walking again on my own. My mama kept telling me they weren’t going to let me go home until they started seeing some improvement.”

He added: “I can’t see how people sit just in one spot without doing anything. Walking and talking is everything to me. If I couldn’t walk or talk, I don’t know what I would do.”

Back at home, Dorsey struggled to relearn everyday aspects of life he had taken for granted for years. He would get up, but experienced pain in his legs because he had been hospitalized for such a long period. Dorsey said he was walking on his own within a week of leaving the hospital, keeping the promise he had made to his doctors back in Winston-Salem.

But Thomas was still required to care for her son in other ways. For several months after he returned home, Thomas bathed her son, cleaned his wounds and cleaned him up after he used the bathroom. A nurse would visit twice a week and suggested moving Dorsey to a nursing home. But knowing the way that COVID-19 settles in at long-term care facilities, Thomas refused, unwilling to put her son in an environment that could put him at risk of contracting COVID-19 again. Instead, Thomas chose to quit her job, knowing that after the ordeal her family had gone through, getting Dorsey back to being himself needed to be her top priority.

Dorsey has only returned to fully doing things on his own for the past three weeks. He is thankful to have spent the holidays with his family and appreciates little things in life like he never has before. He said Friday he finally is feeling like his old self – but not until after surviving an ordeal that nearly claimed his life and that stretched his mother’s faith like nothing else.

“It was hard, but it was worth it,” Thomas said Friday. “I wouldn’t want it no other way. It was a battle when he came home from the hospital – he had to learn how to do everything all over again. … It was a hardship, but it was worth it at the end of the day. It was worth it to take care of my baby, and that’s what I did.”

Now, after initially not taking the coronavirus seriously, Dorsey’s attitude has changed dramatically. He never goes anywhere without a mask, and washes his hands and uses hand sanitizer multiple times over the course of a day. In an area of the country where others may still not accept the seriousness of a pandemic that has killed 368,000 Americans since March, Dorsey now lives his life in a much different way — just thankful to still be here.

His change of heart comes as a time when coronavirus vaccines are just starting to be distributed to health care professionals and front-line workers. It will still be months before the vaccines are readily available to the general public. But Dorsey — for one — will gladly spread the message of following guidelines designed to protect people from a virus that is still alive and well in United States 10 months after the pandemic began.

“I don’t take [the coronavirus] for granted no more,” he said. “There’s still too many people dying because of the coronavirus, and I ain’t going to go through it again. Now I know not to take stuff for granted and take stuff more seriously. At first, I didn’t believe there was a virus going around."

And now?

“I’m just grateful I can see another year,” Dorsey said.