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“One of the problems that’s come up that I never had before COVID was blood pressure problems,” says Shawn Cook.
DALLAS — WFAA first met Shawn Cook during a weekend in April, his family calls their Easter miracle.
The otherwise healthy 49-year-old spent two weeks on a ventilator at Texas Health Hospital Rockwall in the earliest days of the COVID-19 pandemic.
A few hours after doctors and nurses lined the exit and cheered his release, Cook shared what he could recall of the experience.
“I feel probably the best I’ve felt in 16 days,” he said in April. “I don’t even remember day one.”
After that Zoom call, Cook said he had to relearn just about everything from eating to walking.
Now, more than three months later, his road to recovery has found new obstacles.
“One of the problems that’s come up that I never had before COVID was blood pressure problems,” he said.
The latest CDC guidance defines COVID-19 recovery as being fever free for 24 hours without the aid of a fever reducer and “an improvement in symptoms”. The guidelines were modified July 20, reducing the amount of fever-free time down from 72 hours and eliminated the need for improvement in respiratory symptoms.
Cook checks those boxes but admits it doesn’t tell his story.
“A recovery to me would be 100% back to where I was before COVID,” Cook said. “That’s the way I look at it.”
In June, the National Institutes of Health began studying patients who, like Cook, were hospitalized with acute symptoms from the novel coronavirus, to try and learn more about its long-term effects.
While many North Texas counties, including Tarrant, Denton and Collin report recoveries in daily COVID-19 data — Dallas County does not.
Dr. Mark Casanova with the Dallas County Medical Society says the pragmatic answer to why is, the county has too many cases and not enough staff to track recoveries.
Dallas County reported a single day record of 1,267 cases on Saturday.
“This notion of recovery is frankly a work in progress in terms of our understanding,” Casanova said. “Really I think the essence of the question is, ‘What is recovery?’”
A question Cook admits he hasn’t fully answered for himself yet. But given what he’s already overcome, he’s confident he will.
“Absolutely, I’m not going to give up.”
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