LARGO, Fla. — Casey Gray says thought like a lot of other young people do when it comes to the effects COVID-19 could have on his health.
“I was really just not concerned about it because they came out and said that it mostly affects people who are much older than I was,” Gray said.
He says because of that, he didn't wear a mask.
“I was kind of loose on wearing the mask,” Gray said. “That was a mistake, obviously.”
One day he started coughing, feeling fatigued and started getting chills every once in a while. He thought he was just getting a cold.
However, one night while he and his wife were eating dinner, there was a clear sign.
“We were eating dinner one night and we couldn’t taste it,” Gray said. “And we looked at each other and were like, 'I think we have COVID.'”
The virus hit them very differently. For his wife Savannah, it felt like a bad case of the flu. But for him, it hit harder.
“It progressively started getting worse,” Gray said. “I had really hard times breathing and then on Sunday when we were going to get tested, I just couldn’t breathe.”
His wife rushed him to Largo Medical Center and he was admitted to the emergency room on July 5.
“They told me I would just be there a couple of days,” Gray said. “Little did I know, I would be there a lot longer.”
To his surprise, when he contracted the virus, he also discovered he had diabetes and was autoimmune compromised, so that’s why the virus hit him harder.
“They put me on a nasal cannula and then that didn’t work, so they put me on high-flow oxygen, which is just a bigger nasal cannula with more oxygen,” Gray said. “That worked for a couple of days and then I was like I still can’t breathe.”
The next route for doctors was putting Gray on a ventilator.
He was under sedation for 51 days.
“And during that time it all kind of deteriorated very fast,” Gray said.
At one point, even he said the ventilator stopped working and Gray could not breathe.
“My lung cavity, they said, I could only hold like a cup of air in my lungs,” Gray said.
They had to put him on an ECMO machine, which is Extracorporeal Membrane Oxygenation. It’s an aggressive treatment for severe respiratory distress.
“What an ECMO machine is, is there are these big tubes and they put them in my neck and basically what it does is it pulls blood out, oxygenates it for you and then pushes it back in,” Gray said. “That wasn’t enough either so they had to put me on two ECMO machines.”
He was on the treatment for 39 days and for many of the days, his caregivers were unsure of his future. The community rallied for him, and more than 1,000 people followed his progress on a special Facebook page.
“I still wasn’t looking good,” Gray said. “My right lung collapsed, I started internally bleeding and they couldn’t find it. They couldn’t stop it.”
Then he says it stopped on its own.
“There’s no like science or any medical explanation why it just stopped,” Gray said. “They called me a miracle.”
Gray had to endure multiple lung procedures, a tracheotomy, internal bleeding, kidney failure and more. His family said they had to have a lot of hard conversations after he was put on life support.
“My biggest fear was really leaving my wife and family,” Gray said.
After one of his lung procedures, his journey miraculously took a turn in the right direction.
He relearned to walk, talk, and write. Then on Saturday, September 18, he walked out of hospital rehab after battling COVID-19 and reunited with his family at home.
He still has a long road ahead. Gray says he can't walk without a walker and still can't feel his left foot. He says he's happy and thanks God he's home and surrounded by loved ones again.
He says his perspective has completely changed on this virus. He’s encouraging his friends and family to take it seriously and wear a mask.
“It’s not worth the risk,” Gray said.
Hear more about Casey Gray's miraculous recovery tonight on 10 Tampa Bay at 6:00 p.m.
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