BOSTON — Rob Driscoll knows he is lucky to be alive.
He tells Boston 25, “I got a new lease on life and not many people get that.”
Driscoll, who is 31 years old, is originally from Plymouth but now lives in Washington, D.C.
He was recently rolled out of ICU at Med Start Medical Center is D.C. to a corridor lined with people applauding his recovery from COVID-19 that almost killed him.
His mother, Marilee Driscoll, who lives in Plymouth says, “We just thought it was a regular cold or flu. And then the fever got out of control and he ended up pretty quickly in the ICU.”
While in the hospital, Driscoll started gasping for air. Luckily, a nurse was in his room.
“So, right after I went into the hospital I had respiratory failure," said Driscoll. "Basically, my lungs stopped working.”
He was immediately intubated and spent the next 13 days on a ventilator. Marilee rushed to D.C. not knowing what to expect and unable to even visit her son.
“You’re just hoping against hope that you’re not rushing down for a funeral,” said Marilee. "Honestly, we didn’t know if he was going to live or die.”
Driscoll lived. And at 31 years of age he was healthy and had no underlying conditions. Doctors say they don’t know why the virus attacked him badly.
Doctors told him that the scariest thing about this virus is that there is so much we don’t know about it.
His mom of course is overjoyed that her son recovered. So happy, in fact, that she wrote about it on her blog called Things to Do in Plymouth, MA.
She says these days we all need some good news and adding, “so that people can see that it is possible to recover.”
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