ST. LOUIS — Whether he’s serving with the Air Force during Desert Storm; policing the streets of St. Louis; surviving motorcycle accidents and heart attacks, Dave Tenorio always comes home.
His recent battle with COVID-19 was the first time his wife, Kathy, worried that he may not make it back.
Four days after she watched him walk into the emergency room, a doctor told her: “Things aren't looking good.”
“I just sat there, like, ‘No, I've never heard anybody say to me, ‘It’s not looking good’ before where Dave's concerned,” she said. “Dave comes home every time there's a crisis. I pray and I worry, but he always comes home.”
The 55-year-old had just hours to live when St. Luke’s Dr. Jeremy Leidenfrost put him on a treatment that saved his life in April. The doctor calls his recovery “remarkable,” and has written about it for a medical journal.
This week, Dave and his wife, Kathy, shared their story of survival exclusively with 5 On Your Side.
“Every day for me is an absolutely beautiful day, especially when I was told by the doctor the day before I left, ‘I've never seen anybody so close to death as you were."
‘The worst cough’
It began March 21 with a dry cough Dave Tenorio couldn’t shake when he came home from his shift as a motorcycle cop for the St. Louis police department. By that time, news of the pandemic was everywhere, and his wife said she was suspicious that he had the virus right away.
“It was the worst cough I’ve ever seen anybody have,” she said.
But, he didn’t have a fever, or any other symptoms – until about five days later when a low fever set in, as did body aches.
Kathy started coughing, too.
Still, the couple did not initially meet the criteria to be tested for the virus, so they said they self-quarantined at home.
Then, Tenorio’s captain called. One of his fellow traffic officers had tested positive for the virus.
Hillsboro had the nearest test site, so they drove there March 31 despite feeling sick.
“This virus is so strange,” Dave Tenorio said. “My symptoms would change every few days.
"Something else would come up. First, it was the cough. Then, body aches came on and then it was a loss of appetite and fatigue and it would be something different. And there was a period of time where I couldn't taste or smell and that subsided after several days and then my appetite was really bad for a while.”
But that next morning, on April 1, Dave woke up and told his wife he was short of breath and that his arm was feeling numb. Having survived two previous heart attacks, his wife drove him to St. Luke’s.
Then, it was time to say good-bye.
“We pulled up to the ER door. I got out and opened the door and he stood up and I hugged him and I said, ‘Everything's going to be OK,’” she said.
She gave him his cellphone, and told him to call her as soon as he knew something.
“That was it. I had no choice but to leave him, you know, just dump him off there at the ER door,” she said.
“I couldn't even begin to imagine the agony she was going through wondering what was going on because she literally just had to drop me off and I was on my own,” he said.
Kathy forgot her cellphone in her rush to get out the door. A text from her husband was waiting for her when she got home.
“Good thing we came, I’m having a heart attack,” he wrote.
Dave told his wife that doctors were placing a stent.
“We were just talking like, ‘We dodged another bullet,’ because that's kind of how we both felt,” Kathy Tenorio said.
But the relief didn’t last long.
Dave called her back a few hours later. His oxygen levels were dangerously low. Doctors were putting him on a ventilator.
Later, a nurse told him: “I could have started crying because your lungs were just completely white, which meant there was no oxygen in them whatsoever and they knew then that it was looking really bad for me.”
He tested positive for the coronavirus.
“That really was the last thing I expected to hear,” Kathy Tenorio said.
Her husband told her: “I'm not worried. It's going to be OK. I'm coming home to you.”
“But then my phone went dark as far as Dave was concerned,” she said. “I just sat frozen on the couch thinking, ‘What just happened?’
“It just was not on my radar that morning when I took him.”
‘Save his life’
Five days after Kathy dropped her husband off at the emergency room, Dr. Jeremy Leidenfrost, a cardiothoracic surgeon at St. Luke’s Hospital called.
“He told me, ‘The ventilator is not helping him anymore,’” she said.
Again, she froze.
Then, he told her there was one last treatment he wanted to try called ECMO, which is short for Extracorporeal membrane oxygenation.
