For the most serious COVID-19 cases in which patients are not getting enough oxygen, doctors may use ventilators to help a person breathe. Patients are sedated, and a tube inserted into their trachea is then connected to a machine that pumps oxygen into their lungs.

Retired property manager John Leanse never expected that struggling to breathe would separate him so immediately and frighteningly from his wife of 34 years, Julie.

“He tested positive for COVID-19 and was pretty sick with all of the issues COVID-19 patients have, like difficulty breathing and maintaining oxygen in his blood,” said Ari Leonhard, MD, one of John’s physicians and an internal medicine resident who has been treating COVID-19 patients since the pandemic began.

What followed was a nine-day roller coaster of events. Researchers have yet to find an effective treatment for COVID-19, and at the time of John’s hospitalization – relatively early in the spread of the disease in Chicago – doctors were trying ventilators, hydroxychloroquine and an HIV antiviral drug called lopinavir-ritonavir for the sickest patients.

John was treated with all three.

On March 30, he had recovered enough to breathe without the help of the tube in his windpipe. Finally able to speak, he used humor to cope with the stress of illness and being isolated from his family.

John was eventually discharged from the hospital on April 4, and is relieved to be home and to have survived COVID-19 and being on a ventilator.

This story was originally written by Sarah Richards for the University of Chicago Medicine, published on June 18, 2020:
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