EDITOR’S NOTE: The reporter and the subject of the profile have been friends for over 4 years. This story has been approved by the editorial board and has been thoroughly checked for bias.
The dry cough of Robert Garcia, 19, hurt his throat. A dry wheezy cough that made him feel all miserable and yucky all the time seemed to be going away slowly. After all, a dry cough was the long term effects of having pneumonia, a constant fever over the last 16 days and a long bout of hospitalizations. Although, to get fully better still required lots of hard work.
On March 31, 2020, Garcia woke up one morning/night when it became hard to breathe. He described the shortness of breath as unnerving but not alarming yet. His mind wandered to the possibility of COVID-19 but quickly shook off the thought and continued with his day.
The shortness of breath became more frequent and more painful until Garcia began to take the situation seriously. The thought of testing positive crossed his mind again– much to his alarm.
Garcia started to feel the e-cigarettes and vaping side-effects, a product use-associated with lung injury, otherwise known as EVALI.
The American Lung Association says this disease mostly originates with THC filled e-cigarettes, though it is not just limited to THC products. THC can also be contracted through other products such as the well-known JUUL cartridges and other nicotine products.
The shortness of breath quickly developed into a fever that didn’t go away. This is another common symptom of EVALI as said by the ALA website. The COVID-19 symptoms became more prevalent when his joints started to ache; it was time to tell his mother. By this time around, the second day had come.
“At first, I didn’t think it was a big deal,” Garcia said over a phone interview in early April. “I just told my mom, ‘I’m feeling a bit under the weather,’ I didn’t know I was gonna get so sick.”
As his symptoms progressed and realized that it wasn’t a “simple cold,” Garcia suggested to his mother that they go get tested. He knew if he were found whether he was positive or not, it’d at least bring him a sense of peace. At least he would know what to expect moving forward and would be able to respond accordingly. He’d know what lay ahead of him.
“I told my mom, ‘let’s try and get tested,’” Garcia said after a couple days. “Because I want to make sure it’s this.”
A couple days later, Garcia and his mother made their way down to the East Los Angeles College, ELAC, parking lot to complete the test. There, Robert Garcia described the scene as “surreal,” and said that this was the moment the COVID-19 pandemic became “real” to him.
“I saw people wearing hazmat suits,” He said, “It’s like, ‘is this really necessary?’”
Walking into Foothill Presbyterian Hospital, Garcia describes the incessant sounds he heard all around him. He describes the beeping of the heart monitors, the low swish, swish of the ventilators and in the distance a low moan of someone in pain. Sounds that he says, “didn’t make things any better.”
“Even despite my evidence that I didn’t have COVID through the email from my test results,” Garcia said with a sense of frustration, “They still treated me as if I had COVID because I had the shortness of breath and all that.”
This meant being isolated and away from his family.
This is something that Dr. Harrill said in an article published in Investigative Otolaryngology. He said that many vapists have experienced the pandemic. Many of these vapists who visit the hospitals have a version of smokers lung and may get misdiagnosed with COVID-19 with their heavy coughing.
Garcia was moved alone into a series of big white tents that lay outside in the hospital’s parking lot. There, he was sat down in a beige leather chair and had an I.V. saline drip bag stuck into his arm to try and rehydrate him back into a stable level that’d allow him to return home.
“Each time I went [to the hospital], I underwent a couple I.V.s because I was severely dehydrated,” Garcia said. “My heart rate was really fast because I was dehydrated.”
Robert Garcia says he quickly discovered that severe dehydration and an unremitting fever lead to weight and muscle loss. He said within a matter of two weeks he had dropped 20 pounds and was significantly weaker than when the ordeal started. For him, visibly toned muscles have been a significant part of his toned physique since he started playing soccer at a young age.
“I’m definitely weaker than I was,” he said in a distinct melancholic tone.
While feeling weakness and desperation, Garcia followed the trail EVALI set out for him, created by the excessive vitamin E acetate found within the e-cigarettes consumers smoke. Vitamin E acetate is also found in THC products along with the regular nicotine line.
As Garcia sat in the big beige leather chair with the I.V., drip-drip-drip in the silence. He thought constantly about his family and what would become of them if he had COVID-19. He had realized that even if he didn’t have COVID-19, being surrounded by patients who did would be dangerous to his feeble health.
“I thought I was a goner,” he said. “Being surrounded by those patients, it made me feel unsafe.”
He recounts the memory of a patient dying right next to him during one of his counted hospital visits. He described the screams of her family and the commotion of doctors trying to save her. He describes the moments leading up to the death as “horrifying and painful to hear.”
“She would moan in pain constantly,” Garcia recounted, “she seemed to be in pain all the time because she was always making some sort of noise and doctors would check up on her constantly.”
Then one day the beeping started and didn’t stop. The beeping came from the bed next to him where the woman laid. She was dying, he said. Doctors rushed over and tried to revive her until it became silent. A silence pierced by the long continuous beep of her heart monitor.
Garcia was at the hospital for two hours until the I.V. bag was empty and all the saline was in his system. Garcia quickly left afterwards and was reunited with his mom, who was waiting outside the tent, inside the hospital in the waiting room.
“I was just so relieved when everything was over and I got to go home,” Garcia said with another resounding sigh.
Garcia went home and said he had cried under the shower. He had a long hard cry under a steaming hot shower that “burned away the problems.”
“I didn’t cry because I was sick, I cried because I was getting better,” Garcia said. “Coming home after the I.V. bags feeling all better just made me thank God I was alive and feeling better.”
As he got better, he said he started to appreciate the little things in life, started to appreciate how his mom took care of him, how his friends appreciated what they did for him and how his family was there for him. The care from people close to him meant a lot more to him.
“I never would have guessed that buying fake ‘carts’ would have made me so sick,” said Garcia with a shock. “I never would have guessed that the weed was the cause of all my problems.”
As he got better, he said he started to go back to eating three meals a day. He slowly built up his stomach’s strength to eating hard food again beyond the BRAT, bananas, rice, applesauce and toast diet he’d been put on during the whole ordeal.
He has slowly gotten back the 20 pounds he had lost and finding ways to rebuild the strength he lost.
“I recently spoke to my doctor about starting to work out again,” he said enthusiastically, “I’m just waiting to hear from the doctor so he can approve it.”
He continued, “If anything, I will definitely lay off the weed for a long time,” he said. “I’m done with that bullshit.”
