On March 18, Jeff Gerson, a 45-year-old from Manhattan, arrived at NYU Langone Tisch Hospital with shortness of breath, an uncontrollable cough, and a 103-degree fever.
After a day, he was diagnosed with Covid-19 and put on a ventilator.
Gerson spent five months trying to track down 116 medical professionals who helped him recover.
“I just feel tremendously grateful and lucky,” Gerson said in a CNN report. “The story, if there is one, is not necessarily that I survived, but that these people saved my life. I really felt the need to find them, get their names, and thank them.”
Gerson penned a letter in November to thank the doctors, nurses, respiratory therapists and others. He emailed it to a hospital administrator, who passed it along to the staff.
“If you are receiving this letter, it is because I have become aware that you had a part in saving my life,” Gerson wrote. “It is only after much effort on my part to find your names that I would realize just how many of you there were on my care team.”
The Covid-19 survivor looks for the names in three ways. He started with the MyChart app, which tracks a patient’s tests and care and saw who ordered the more than 750 tests, from blood work to EKGs, he went through while at the hospital.
In late April, a nurse helped him get 60 names in a spreadsheet a month after he was discharged, and he later on checked the insurance reports to see names tied to his insurance claims.
Gerson said that he had to find a way to thank them. Saying thank you when he awoke from the coma was difficult, as the hospital limited the number of staff coming in and out of his ICU room.
“Except for the nurses that I was directly interacting with, there really wasn’t an opportunity to say thank you to anybody.
It left a void in my emotional recovery,” Gerson said. “Here I am having survived, I’m crying with joy every morning and I feel a huge debt of gratitude to these people who I can’t even talk to because they’re not coming into my room.
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A kind nurse excitedly welcomed Gerson back and quickly offered to help him call friends and family who were so concerned about him. No one had been allowed to visit.
Gerson awoke on April 17. “I woke up just in time to call my son on his sixth birthday,” he said.
A week later, an “emotional parade through the hallway of the hospital” greeted him when he was discharged, Gerson said.
“It was really a party and a celebration for the people in the hospital,” Gerson said. “They were just ecstatic and so happy to be sending someone to rehab alive and with a good prognosis.”
Gerson said he wanted to throw a huge party for everyone who helped him, that was until he realized the world had changed in the time he was in a coma.
“I looked out the window and this is when it slowly started occurring to me: The world was not the same world that I left when I went to sleep,” he said.
Dr. Luis Angel, a pulmonologist and critical care specialist, was one of Gerson’s ICU doctors.
“Soon after he was admitted to our hospital, he developed respiratory failure and pneumonia with Covid,” Angel told CNN.
“It was clear that we weren’t able to support him initially with the oxygen and then with the mechanical ventilation. Then it became important for him to use the system that is called the ECMO.”
“He was very, very sick and we had to keep him under really deep sedation in a way that he couldn’t remember anything for at least two or three weeks until his lungs started recuperating with time,” Angel said.
Angel said that using ECMO and tracheostomies, which were both done for Gerson, were two “controversial” treatments at that point. The thought was that these patients were so sick that they would not survive the treatment.
“Jeff was one of almost 50 patients that we placed on ECMO here at NYU during the pandemic,” the doctor said.
Angel said if not for the ECMO and tracheostomy, Gerson would have died.
When Angel saw the letter Gerson wrote to those who cared for him, he said it felt “nice” but that the team was just doing their job.
“In the end, we are not looking for anyone to particularly say thank you or anything like that,” Angel said. However, after working long shifts and not taking time off for weeks and weeks, the doctor said that the letter was meaningful.
“You see the significant amount of work that he did and somebody that very likely was going to die in the hospital, makes a full recovery and then he’s able to say thank you is very meaningful for us,” Angel said.
Gerson was unable to reach one person that cared for him, Dr. Sydney Mehl, who was treating patients with Covid-19 when he too fell sick and died of the coronavirus, a hospital spokeswoman confirmed.
Since Gerson sent the letter to hospital workers, he said he’s heard from even more people who helped care from him.
The number is now up to 151.
“Continue doing what you do,” Gerson wrote in the letter. “Continue being the heroes you are and know you will forever have my gratitude.”