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Coronavirus in Oklahoma: In pain from COVID-19, attorney was OK with dying

Nolan Clay

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Sloan

Feverish and in agonizing pain from COVID-19, Oklahoma City attorney Chris Sloan thought three or four times at the hospital that he was going to die.

And, he said Sunday, he had accepted it.

"It was so bad you kind of get to a place where you're comfortable with dying just to get out of the pain," he said. "And you hope you never end up there, you know. But I ended up there."

Sloan, 44, was one of the first Oklahomans to test positive for COVID-19. He was back home at his apartment Sunday after spending two weeks in an intensive care unit at OU Medical Center.

He was taken by ambulance to the hospital's emergency room March 21 after being ill at home for more than a week. He believes he became infected while in vacation with friends in Miami, Florida.

"I could not breathe even with all the oxygen they had me on. My temperature was generally 103 to 104," he said of his first nights at the Oklahoma City hospital. "Just the amount of body aches and pains, I've never experienced anything like it.

"It hurt to try to breathe. It hurt to try to move," he said. "You do kind of like mentally get to a point where you're like, all right, if this is the end, I'm OK with it to get out of the pain. It was that bad."

He believes he hallucinated at times, seeing people from his past.

He has oxygen at home now to help him recover. He said he was told he must quarantine himself there for seven more days.

He praised the doctors and nurses at OU Medical Center for getting him through the worst of the illness. "They were 100% wonderful up there," he said.

In intensive care with him were others also battling COVID-19.

"There were plenty of people up there that were on ventilators," he said. "There was a woman they brought in. ... I could hear her crying night after night after night. She was right behind me. I could just hear her through the walls.

"Her husband had died a week prior of COVID-19. ... I don't know what happened to her. I don't know if she made it or not. But after about the third night of her crying, I didn't hear it anymore." he said. "It was the saddest thing."

He acknowledged that he experienced worse symptoms than most who become infected. He concluded the interview with a warning.

"Be careful. Still, be careful. This is terrible," he said.