From frontlines to ventilator to recovery: Dothan respiratory therapist battles COVID-19

He let his guard down once, but that was all it took to leave him fighting for his life.

“I was working in the emergency room quite a bit during the first phase of the COVID so I saw a lot of those COVID patients come in,” Taylor said. “I saw the different ways we were changing the way that we treated the patients that came through the door to protect everyone from the COVID … We had to treat everybody like they had it. We had to protect ourselves like they had it.”

Serrell Taylor and his wife, Takiesha – a nurse at a local dialysis clinic – took every precaution to protect themselves and their children. They wore masks, used hand sanitizer and practiced social distancing.

Before Serrell got sick, he worked three jobs – respiratory therapy at Southeast Health, COVID-19 testing three days a week and doing home health visits.

In July, the Taylors took a youth travel basketball team that Serrell coaches to a tournament in Orlando, Florida. They followed all the same protocols they would back home in Alabama. They sprayed disinfectant on surfaces where they stayed and fussed at the boys on the team to keep their masks up when out sightseeing. But in the gym during the games, Serrell let his guard down, regularly sliding his mask up and down to speak to other coaches and game officials.

“When I got in the gym, I felt comfortable,” he said. “… That’s the only time I was unprotected. I know for a fact that was the only time I was unprotected because we didn’t want to get anybody sick on this trip.”

He started feeling ill before the seven-day tournament even ended. It started with a headache that Serrell thought was related to his blood pressure. Takiesha was sitting in the stands and noticed her husband’s sluggishness during a game. She even texted Serrell about not being as engaged as he normally would be during a game. At the time, Serrell said he didn’t even realize his team was losing.

The next day, his eyes were blood shot and his symptoms had worsened. His temperature reached 101. Serrell had seen enough of COVID-19 to be worried. He turned his coaching duties over to another parent, isolated himself and tried to tough out the illness until the tournament ended.

Back home, the respiratory therapist monitored his oxygen level and stayed isolated.

Two days after they returned to Dothan, Serrell woke up struggling to breathe and didn’t even have enough strength to walk on his own. When he got to Southeast Health’s emergency room on July 22, his blood oxygen level was in the 70s. Inflammation had left his lungs filled with fluid. The ER doctor almost immediately suggested a ventilator.

Serrell and Takiesha didn’t even have a chance to speak first. In the 10 minutes it took Takiesha to get to the hospital, Serrell had already been intubated.

“It was very scary, but I just tried to maintain and tried to be strong for our family and kids during that time,” Takiesha said.

At Southeast Health, Serrell was surrounded by nurses, doctors and therapists who knew him. Some had worked alongside him since 2002. As his body’s organs began to fail, his friends and co-workers were his caretakers. His chances of recovery were not good and Takiesha was allowed to visit him in early August.

She prayed over her husband and told him to fight. The next day, his oxygen levels began to improve. Each new day, he needed less and less oxygen.

In Alabama, there have been 18,342 healthcare workers diagnosed with COVID-19 in the year since a pandemic was declared.

Serrell Taylor was on a ventilator for 29 days. In all, he spent six weeks in the hospital’s Intensive Care Unit, another 17 days in long-term care and one week in rehab. It took weeks after he came off the ventilator for Serrell to really grasp what had happened to him.

“Even after they extubated me I do not have too many memories of that,” Serrell said.

In those hazy weeks after he woke up, he remembers being with Takiesha at a condo in New Orleans. In his dream-like hallucination, a hurricane was approaching land. He didn’t know he had a tracheostomy; he didn’t know he had been on dialysis due to his kidneys failing. All those weeks in a hospital bed, his muscles atrophied and he lost 61 pounds.

Takiesha, however, kept a log of everything that was done medically to Serrell because she knew he would want to know. She received regular updates and called daily to check on him.

“It was very difficult because I really wanted to be at the hospital with him,” she said.

Both Serrell and Takiesha are now fully vaccinated and hope anyone who has the opportunity to be vaccinated will do so. They still wear their masks; wash their hands as recommended and social distance when necessary.

“I’m trying to encourage people to take a shot,” Serrell said. “I’d rather take my chance with science then fight that monster again because it was absolutely a monster.”

Serrell has slowly returned to work at Southeast Health. Polyneuropathy in his feet makes walking for long stretches painful, so his work schedule and tasks have been adjusted to accommodate such limitations. He also has some neuropathy in his right hand.

Co-workers get on to him if he tries to do too much. Friends and co-workers have not only taken care of him, but they took care of his family while he was hospitalized.

He hopes in time, the neuropathy – caused by being bedridden for so long – will go away. He’s been referred to a post-COVID clinic at UAB designed for patients whose recovery stretches weeks and months after their initial illness.

He knows he’s lucky to be alive and appreciates his life that much more as a result.

“I’m nowhere near where I want to be at, but I’m patient,” Serrell said. “God spared me, so I’ve got to wait on him.”