On March 14, Santa Maria resident Louis Meza went from feeling healthy to violently ill overnight.
“I woke up about 2 in the morning, and I couldn’t stop shivering,” he told the Sun a month later.
For Louis and Melissa Meza, that night was the start of a battle with COVID-19 that the couple is still fighting. While Louis has fully recovered, Melissa also caught the virus. She was improving but still hospitalized as of April 24.
Using Facebook to post updates about Melissa’s condition, Louis has reached people across the nation. His story even made national news in a video interview with NBC on April 23.
But national attention aside, Louis is about as “locally grown” as it gets. He was born and raised in Casmalia, about 5 miles southwest of Santa Maria. Today he works as a chef in Casmalia at The Hitching Post, a barbecue restaurant and the heartbeat of the tiny town.
“When he was 5 years old, he came looking for my dad to see if there was some work he could do,” the restaurant’s general manager, Terri Stricklin, told the Sun. “He just has that kind of work ethic still to this day.”
Four of The Hitching Post’s employees ended up testing positive for COVID-19, Stricklin said.
“It made it real for all of us,” Stricklin said. “It wasn’t somebody you read about in the paper: It was somebody that we know and were close to.”
When Louis started feeling ill, his mind went immediately to COVID-19—sudden fever is one of the hallmark symptoms of the disease.
Currently, anyone who shows up with COVID-19 symptoms at Marian Regional Medical Center is tested, said Dr. Kevin Ferguson, medical director of the Clinical Laboratory and Pathology Department at Dignity Health Laboratories of Central Coast Division North.
But when Louis got sick on March 14, this wasn’t yet the case.
Because of limited numbers of tests early on, “When people had influenza we weren’t testing for COVID, unless for some reason they didn’t recover,” Ferguson said.
Louis contacted his doctor, got his nose swabbed in the parking lot, and tested positive for influenza-A. He went home feeling relieved.
“My wife was bringing me food, and we were thinking it’s just influenza-A,” he said. “So she was around me the whole time.”
But Louis’ fever, body aches, headaches, and cough wouldn’t subside. Over the next few days, he made two trips to the emergency room at Marian Regional Medical Center. After revealing that he was diagnosed with influenza-A, he was sent home each time. Then, Louis began coughing so hard that he could barely get out of bed.
“I felt like I couldn’t breathe,” he recalled. “I was coughing up blood.”
On March 23, Melissa drove her husband to the hospital one more time.
“I just told them, ‘I cannot go back home. I am so sick,’” Louis remembers. “The first thing I heard from the doctor was, ‘This guy has the virus.’”
Because of his condition, Louis was tested, isolated, and treated like a COVID-19 patient. Four days later, what he and his doctors already suspected was confirmed: Louis didn’t just have influenza-A, he also had COVID-19.
“We have seen co-infection, but it’s very uncommon,” Ferguson said.
While Louis was recovering in the hospital, Melissa began experiencing symptoms at home. Like Louis, it took Melissa three trips to the hospital to be admitted. At first, Louis said, she wasn’t sick enough to get a hospital room. But by her third trip, “She was in trouble,” Louis said. “She just couldn’t breathe.”
Melissa was admitted the same day that Louis left, March 28, so the couple has been apart since Louis was first admitted more than a month and a half ago. Just before Louis was discharged, he remembers his nurse coming back into his room.
“He says, ‘Your wife did get admitted into the hospital, but we had to intubate her right away,’” Louis recalled. “I just lost it. I started crying.”
Louis, 47, has a pre-existing condition—rheumatoid arthritis. He said his doctors believe that the arthritis medication he was already taking, a steroid, might have made it easier for him to fight the virus.
But Melissa, 43, didn’t have any health problems before contracting the disease, Louis said. The virus just happened to hit her harder.
As the days passed, Melissa wasn’t improving, so her doctors started searching for a plasma donor match. Convalescent plasma treatments, in which a recovered person’s antibodies are given to a sick patient, “have been tried in other illnesses for which we don’t have vaccines,” Ferguson said.
But this early on in the pandemic, health officials say it’s difficult to know whether plasma treatments are responsible for patient recovery. Since hospitalized patients are often receiving a slew of treatments, Ferguson said that any improvements in patients who receive plasma are, for now, “anecdotal.” But for someone as sick as Melissa, doctors were determined to try everything.
After finding a match from a recovered man in Ventura County, Melissa was the first COVID-19 patient at Marian to receive the plasma treatment, Louis said. It helped, but she was still struggling.
The next option was to get Melissa on an extracorporeal membrane oxygenation (ECMO) machine. These blood-cleaning machines have helped coronavirus patients across the globe when nothing else is working. Although Marian “is evaluating the necessary steps to enhancing clinical services by adding an ECMO program,” Chief Nursing Officer Candice Monge told the Sun in an email that “there are no ECMO programs on the Central Coast.”
Despite no local ECMO machines, Louis had a premonition: “I kept telling everybody, there’s going to be a miracle Easter Sunday.” Sure enough, that weekend, an ECMO machine opened up at Providence Saint John’s Hospital in Santa Monica. On Easter Sunday, Louis was informed that Melissa could be transported within two hours, with his permission.
“‘The high risk about this is she might not survive the ride,’” Louis recalls the doctor saying. “I had made the decision with my family, and I told everybody, ‘We have to send her.’”
Melissa made it. Within two days, Louis received a text from the doctors down in Santa Monica: “She’s breathing on her own.”
“I just started crying,” Louis said. “I was so excited.”
While the ECMO machine helped tremendously, Melissa’s battle was far from over. After days of improvements, Melissa experienced a setback and had to get back on the ECMO machine.
“She’s not running fevers, her heart rate’s good. All kidney functions, liver functions are really good,” Louis said on April 22. “But she’s still having a hard time breathing.”
On April 24, Louis said Melissa was back off ECMO, breathing on her own with oxygen assistance and a long road to recovery ahead of her. Louis left the hospital more than a month ago, but he continues to be cautious because his COVID-19 tests keep turning up positive. As of April 22, Louis had taken five of the highly uncomfortable nasal tests. He’s waiting for a negative result so he can donate his plasma.
“We typically take donations after their PCR becomes negative,” Ferguson said. PCR stands for polymerase chain reaction, the type of test used to identify COVID-19 patients.
“If I come up negative, I’m donating right away,” Louis said. “I wish more people would do it. I think the problem is people are ashamed that they had it.”
Louis encouraged his fellow COVID-19 survivors to overcome the stigma around the disease and donate.
“His activism on the part of their illness has been impressive,” Stricklin said of her co-worker. “It’s made it real for so many people, not just his friends and family and co-workers, but to our whole community.”
Reach Staff Writer Malea Martin at mmartin@santamariasun.com.
This article appears in Apr 30 – May 7, 2020.