Kansas man didn’t believe in COVID. Now he’s had a tracheotomy — and change of heart
With a tracheotomy tube in his throat, Anil Gharmalkar tried to explain what he would tell people who think COVID-19 is no worse than the flu.
He’d already given it some thought, because he used to be like one of those “deniers.”
The 41-year-old truck driver from Parsons, Kansas, will declare publicly now that he didn’t believe the coronavirus would get him. The breathing tube in his throat that sometimes whistles when he speaks, and that he has to be careful with when he’s showering, went a long way toward changing his mind about that.
There’s a chance he might have to live with it for the rest of his life.
Gharmalkar caught COVID-19 in April during an out-of-town trip. The virus is gone, but the 150-mile drives north to University of Kansas Hospital persisted for months.
He developed complications from the tracheotomy needed to open his airways when they began to shut down. He spent time on a ventilator.
Seven months later he still has shortness of breath. He still gets fatigued. He still has trouble breathing at times. Other than that …
“Honestly … I think it’s been harder on my wife than it’s been on me,” Gharmalkar said last week during a daily COVID-19 briefing hosted by the University of Kansas Health System. It came the day after yet another throat procedure left his vocal cords “a little angry.”
Gharmalkar said his wife wouldn’t sleep at night, staying awake “while I was sleeping because she was afraid I wouldn’t wake her up if I stopped breathing. It took a toll.”
He admitted that before he got sick, “it’s ridiculous and inexcusable, and I had a friend who was a critical care nurse in New York City and I heard what was going on there. And I firmly believed that as healthy as I was, I wouldn’t get it, it wouldn’t affect me.
“I even told my wife it wouldn’t be that serious if I got it. I didn’t think it would be in our region, it was a big-city problem. It was a problem for people seriously ill or elderly.
“Even when my mom dropped me off at the ER — as a nurse she didn’t use PPE to drop me off for the 20-minute drive and because of that day on that drive, my last thought before the ventilator was, ‘Oh my God, I’ve killed my family.’”
Nobody else in his family got the virus, and now avoiding crowds and wearing a mask are part of his new normal.
His world, his “bubble,” is much smaller, just his wife and their two daughters. Most everyone else they avoid.
“Anyone that comes into contact with us, everyone is masked up,” he said. “There’s a lot of concern since my recovery started over with our last visit to the ICU, I may not be able to withstand even a flu virus or something that might be (innocuous) at this time.”
Gharmalkar’s doctor at KU, Dr. Shannon Kraft, an ear, nose and throat specialist, also appeared on the video briefing and said the trauma Gharmalkar experienced is not unique to COVID-19 patients.
“This is what goes into someone’s throat when we need to help them breathe,” Kraft said. “We intubate hundreds of patients a day for surgeries and it’s not a big deal. But when you have a critically ill patient with other medical comorbidities, this tube that sits between your vocal cords can actually put pressure on those cords and cause inflammation.”
Data from China showed that about 10% to 15% of COVID-19 patients will be sick enough to require intubation, Kraft said. And while Gharmalkar was her first patient with COVID-19, he was not the only one to sustain trauma to his throat, which often requires multiple surgeries to fix.
“One of the most disappointing things after leaving an ICU after a long bout, it creeps up two to three months after the intubation,” said Kraft. “We anticipate we’re going to see more of these patients with these types of injuries.”
For his part, Gharmalkar said he’s done giving “lip service” to being safe and worries about what will happen if others don’t change their tune, too.
He said COVID didn’t care “what I believed, and thank God everyone at KU when I got there didn’t care either. And they fought like hell and it took an inordinate amount of labor and man hours and doctors and nurses to keep me alive and get me back, even up ‘til now.
“It scares me if enough people show up that need as much care as I needed to stay alive (whether) there will be enough services to keep them there or for people to recover.”
This story was originally published November 23, 2020 at 5:00 AM.
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