Wesley’s Covid Heart

Hi, my name is Michelle. I am fundraising for my sister and her husband Wesley and their family.

If you know Wesley as I do, you know how hard it is for him to sit still and not be busy. He’s always been the one doing things while everyone else relaxes. He’s always on his feet, building something or fixing things and would go entirely out of his way for anyone. However, he recently spent five days in the hospital with congestive heart failure caused by Covid, and If his heart doesn’t get better over the next few months, he’ll need a pacemaker or possibly a heart transplant. Between the weak heart and all the medicines, it's impossible for Wesley to even walk around his neighborhood block without needing a long nap. He currently cannot work or provide for his family between the soft heart and all the medication he presently needs. They can’t bear this burden alone; please help.

The Whole Story:

On Jan 18th of this year, Wes went to a friend’s bday party whose family had just gotten over a stomach virus. On the 21st, Wes began feeling very nauseous but never had any other stomach virus-like symptoms. At the same time, Wes’s son, Hudson, also started having stomach virus symptoms. We assumed that Wes caught the stomach virus, but because Covid was still seemingly everywhere, He got himself tested and was negative. For about four days, he felt horrible but never had typical stomach virus symptoms and never ran a fever. Both Wes and Hudson began feeling better on the fifth day and returned to life.

A few days later, Wes went up the stairs in their home to tuck their girls into bed and was winded by the time he got to the top. He didn’t think much of it then, but maybe it was residual from the stomach virus. For the next few weeks, when he went up the stairs, he noticed that “winded” feeling sometimes, but other times, not so much.

On Feb 17th, Wes and Priscilla fell asleep on the couch watching 1883. The following day He woke up coughing like crazy. Once he got moving, the cough went away, but he didn’t feel great. That weekend, he planned to go camping with some friends in Tioga and was supposed to leave the Friday night but decided to wait until Saturday to see if he felt any better. On Saturday, the cough was gone, so he went camping with no issues. On Sunday morning, he met up with his mom, stepdad, and brother along with his brother’s family to watch his niece Layla in the Ball Mardi Gras parade. While he was there, he and his mom were outside raking pine straw in his brother’s yard, and he noticed his mom raking circles around him, and he couldn’t catch his breath. His mom told him to see about that as soon as he got back to Lafayette, and on Monday morn, he did just that.

At the Urgent Care clinic, he was diagnosed with Pneumonia. They did a flu test and a Covid test, but both were negative. They sent him home with a prescription of antibiotics but told him to go to the ER if it got worse.

That night, it got worse, and by Tuesday morning, he couldn’t stand the coughing anymore, so Priscilla brought him to the ER. The ER doctor did another Covid test, and again, it was negative, but they also drew blood to check for antibodies that came back positive. They also did an X-ray and a CT scan which showed that his lungs and chest cavity were full of fluid. That prompted the cardiologist to do an echocardiogram which showed that his heart was functioning (in layman’s terms) at 20% capacity. They kept him at Lourdes for five days, ran more tests, and concluded that this must have been from Covid because he had the antibodies. They also concluded that the virus must have reached his heart at some point in the previous month, where it was able to slowly and silently eat away at his heart until pneumonia from the fluid build-up hospitalized him. He walked out of the ER 5 days later but now has to wear a Life Vest (wearable defibrillator) at all times just in case his heart gives out. He’s also on five different heart medications that cause “extreme fatigue and tiredness.”

If you know about their current situation, then you know they were already in a rough spot and that he wasn’t working, but he was doing enough here and there to help keep the bills paid. Now, all that is off the table and by the doctor’s orders “if he’s breathing hard, he’s done too much.”