Dr. Haadi Shuaib, was an extremely fit 20-something who got a pesky sore throat. Less than a week later, he was in a coma.
Last March, Shuaib, now 30, had been working long hours at Northwell’s Staten Island University Hospital amid an Omicron surge. He came down with laryngitis that turned into severe strep-pneumonia and toxic shock syndrome.
On March 18, 2022, he decided he needed to go to the emergency department at his hospital, but he barely made it.
“It’s literally two blocks away from where I was, but I had to stop and catch my breath. I got this tunnel vision,” Shuaib, a highly active outdoorsman and traveler who is known to row 6 kilometers in his downtime, told The Post.
“Then I knew this was serious. This is not normal,” Shuaib added.
The next morning, Shuaib was ambulanced to Long Island Jewish Medical Center in New Hyde Park and to be put on a ventilator.
Doing so required he be intubated and knocked out, something he was hesitant to do.
He was well aware there was a possibility he wouldn’t wake up.
“I was forcing [the team] to give me back my phone to look up other options, I kept researching it and was trying to look up articles and case studies as my peripheral vision was going out from the illness,” Shuaib said
In the process, he’d yell for “more morphine!”
Ultimately, he accepted that the aggressive treatment was his only option.
“I told my co-workers if I didn’t come to in two weeks to pull the plug,” Shuaib said, noting that any longer would likely mean he would be put on life support for an extreme length of time.
Shuaib’s parents were out of the country and couldn’t make it to the hospital in time to see him before he was put into a coma.
But two old friends stood by his side as he was put under.
“The last thing I remember [before going under] was my friends holding my hands, one friend on one side and one on the other. Just completely surrounded by people who I know and trusted,” he said.
But, he failed to get better on the ventilator.
“He was on maximum settings on the ventilator, he was on 100% oxygen and still his oxygen levels were low and they were getting worse,” Dr. Mangala Narasimhan, LIJ’s acute lung injury program medical director, told The Post.
“There was really no more support that we could give with just a ventilator, so we knew that it was time to do something else.”
So, they turned to an extracorporeal membrane oxygenation machine, which would pump blood out of his body and oxygenate it before flowing it back into him.
It was a last resort to keep Shuaib alive.
“Putting big tubes into your major blood vessels, We don’t do this unless we really think there’s no other option,” Narasimhan said.
Miraculously, on ECMO, Shuaib grew stronger each day.
After nine days, he was pulled off ECMO.
Three days later, he was removed from medical ventilation. He didn’t even know how long he had been out at first.
“I remember coming to this trauma of gagging on a tube and trying to communicate to people that I just want this tube out of me,” Shuaib recalled of his first memories out of the coma.
What exactly triggered the condition is still unknown to Shuaib’s colleagues and caretakers.
“It’s a fluke. We don’t know [what brought this on still]. It’s a great mystery,” said Dr. Frank Rosell, associate chair of cardiac surgery at SIUH.
He added that Shuaib’s high fitness level ended up being the game changer in terms of his survival.
“He has the heart of an olympic athlete. A very strong heart … that was a very useful function that we had to rely on. I think it made all the difference.”
After being told by his care team that PTSD and depression were very real possibilities in wake of the coma, Shuaib was determined to back working a month later — something Narasimhan said is a marvel within itself.
The harrowing ordeal has made him a better doctor, Shuaib believes.
“Just being able to tell [patients and families] that I went through that as well, it makes a world of difference for them,” he said.
“It really does.”
