Stroll again with me for a second to late September 2020. I do know — we’d all reasonably run screaming than stroll again to these horrifying, apocalyptic, pre-vaccine occasions. However bear with me. This story has an inconceivable, hard-fought and badly wanted blissful ending. As a result of Mark Nepi of Highlands Ranch, towards each pandemic odd, didn’t die.
And to at the present time, nobody actually is aware of why.
He had some benefits. The match, 66-year-old U.S. Postal Service government had greater than 100 triathlons and biathlons below his belt. He had dozens of heroic health-care employees pulling for him at Littleton Adventist Hospital. And he has, properly … a most unusual COVID spouse. Half cheerleader, half advocate, half drumbeat — Suzanne Nepi was in it to win it.
However take into account that in Mark’s excruciating 37 days within the intensive-care unit, greater than 240,000 others around the globe died of COVID. “The folks on the hospital informed us that nobody has walked the identical stroll that Mark did and survived,” Suzanne says flatly. “Nobody.”
His survival was so inconceivable on the time that his story was beamed around the globe by media retailers determined to inform an excellent story throughout one of the crucial unrelentingly bleak information cycles in our nation’s historical past. #NepiStrong turned a ubiquitous social hashtag.
Mark didn’t come out of his ordeal unscarred. He has everlasting coronary heart and lung injury. BAnd continual fibromyalgia, which causes ache and tenderness all through his physique and makes it laborious to sleep. However final Tuesday, he swam a full mile for the primary time because the Nepi household’s world without end modified on Sept. 29, 2020.
It began with just a bit tickle within the throat. And never even Mark’s — it was his spouse’s. Mark felt one thing was off three days later. However whereas Suzanne’s signs by no means grew a lot past a minor chilly, “Mark’s went from zero to 100 in 5 days,” she stated. Suzanne took Mark to the ER pondering he may get an IV drip and a few oxygen and be launched in just a few hours. As an alternative, Mark’s X-rays confirmed that he had so many blood clots in his lungs, they regarded like they had been stuffed with damaged glass. He was rushed to the ICU, and that was the final time Suzanne would see her husband within the flesh for almost a month.
Three days later, Mark was placed on a ventilator. And right here’s the factor about ventilators: “They’re solely constructed for 2 weeks,” Suzanne stated. “Any longer than that and chances are high, you by no means come off.” Mark later likened “driving the vent,” as he calls it, to an never-ending spin on Mrs. Toad’s Wild Journey — the acute model. As soon as, he aspirated and nearly died. Twice, he needed to be paralyzed for as much as 72 hours — which is one thing the central nervous system doesn’t take kindly to.
“Being on a ventilator for an prolonged interval is near hell on this Earth,” Mark stated. “It’s like being waterboarded, almost actually drowning in your individual fluids.”
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The vent crashed the morning of Halloween — their daughter’s birthday. That was Day 19, and he wouldn’t do 20. Mark managed to textual content Suzanne for the primary time because the lengthy nightmare started. “I need off,” he typed. Adopted by: “I’d reasonably have just a few hours and even minutes of room air than another evening on that factor.”
That was it, Suzanne thought. “He was completed.”
No matter you might be imagining by way of how dangerous this nightmare acquired for the Nepis, simply know that it was worse. The a number of near-death encounters. The ache of being saved essentially aside, together with each of them being saved from their two grown youngsters. The fixed name for a Code Blue over the hospital intercom, asserting one other demise. Mark heard it time and again for 3 weeks. Day 27 was the couple’s thirtieth wedding ceremony anniversary, “which was its personal recent hell,” Suzanne stated.
I’m going to skip previous any extra gory particulars, as a result of No for the blissful ending. Spoiler alert: After they extubated Mark, he didn’t die. Three days later — the day of the 2020 presidential election — he examined damaging and was moved to the non-COVID aspect of the ICU. Mark lastly got here house Nov. 30 — two months and a day after Suzanne’s first throat tickle.
In some ways, that ending was just the start for the Nepis. Suzanne is a Denver theater actor who has been acting on phases throughout the metro space for 25 years, taking part in every little thing from a singing nun in “Nunsense” to nasty boozehound Martha in “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf.”
Mark is a much more non-public particular person, so the eye took some getting used to as soon as longtime TV information anchor Anne Trujillo informed the Nepis’ story to Channel 7 viewers, which was then picked up by ABC’s “World Information Tonight.”
Mark’s consequence was a win for the couple, for his or her family and friends, and for the big native arts group that rallied round them via all of it. However not solely as a result of Mark didn’t die. Additionally due to all that has occurred since he made it out of the COVID forest alive.
By the point Mark was launched, Suzanne had bonded with the ICU group at Littleton Adventist like a pack of lions. In them, she noticed “saints, saviors and troopers — warrior angels who put the identical quantity of affection into each affected person that they put into Mark.” And in Suzanne, they noticed an unshakeable and emboldening instance of the mannequin affected person accomplice. “They had been taken with my need to maintain Mark combating,” Suzanne stated. After which one thing loopy occurred: “They referred to as and requested if I’d be an emotional assist coach for different ICU households.” Suzanne was all in.
She acted as an advocate and an ear for not less than 16 COVID households, together with a lady who had simply misplaced her 45-year-old mom. Mother and father of a 28-year-old son. And none aside from Trujillo, one among Denver’s most beloved TV journalists ever. On the air, Trujillo simply exudes widespread decency. No surprise, then, that after Trujillo reported Suzanne’s story, the pair turned associates for all times.
“I’ve coated hundreds of tales, and I’ll always remember theirs,” Trujillo stated. “Mark’s extreme case was a dose of actuality, and Suzanne’s candor in detailing the heartache and worry of what they had been going via as a household made us all cease and assume, ‘What if this was occurring to somebody I really like?’ ”
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And in Trujillo’s case, it was. She had a cousin, Rachel, going via one thing comparable in New Mexico, and Trujillo requested Suzanne to present her a name.
“It was Rachel’s husband who was near demise with COVID,” Trujillo informed me. “Suzanne helped Rachel get via a very troublesome time.” (Rachel’s husband is now a lot improved.)Being an empath is a job Suzanne was seemingly born to play. One other is the position of Suzanne Nepi. And that’s precisely who she’s taking part in proper now on the Benchmark Theatre in Lakewood.
“The COVID Spouse” is a brand new play devised by Nepi and director Neil Truglio that tells extra than simply the unreal actual story of what the couple went via. It’s also an homage, Nepi says, to all of the medical troopers who work within the intensive-care unit at Littleton Adventist and elsewhere.
In reality, the plan was to honor that military of angels by having 30 of them attend Friday’s sold-out opening efficiency, however life threw another moist blanket on the Nepis: The pc that controls all the play’s technical parts crashed 45 minutes earlier than curtain, forcing the premiere to be delayed by a day. A minor setback, given all they’ve been via, and it gave all of them extra time to bond anew within the theater’s foyer bar.
Nepi performs herself and Tanis Joaquin Gonzales performs just about everybody else within the play. It was important to Nepi that her scene accomplice be an actor of colour, she stated, “as a result of Mark’s principal physician is Indian, and most of his caregivers had been brown.”
She wrote the play, she stated bluntly, as a result of she was bugged into doing it. “So many individuals have been telling us that this can be a ‘Rudy’ type of story, and that we wanted to inform it,” she stated.
So, she is. And one essential facet of that story, she forewarns, is the pointless politics of the pandemic. Suzanne admits that she has advanced over the previous 30 years from a religious Catholic and anti-abortion conservative into … one thing else completely. Understanding she had associates who voted for Donald Trump, who acquired the very best out there COVID remedy on Earth whereas Mark was mendacity close to demise, she stated, was irreconcilably painful for her. She says she performs that half fairly cool within the play however, speaking to me, Mark pulled no punches.
“I take into account Trump to be a mass assassin who’s personally and legally liable for almost all of COVID deaths, near-deaths and people struggling extreme long-haul signs like myself,” he stated. “For the thousands and thousands languishing within the wake of his ineptitude and outright lawlessness.”However the play, Suzanne stated, is supposed to be a singular, uplifting and unifying expertise. As a first-time playwright, she’s not guaranteeing Tracy Letts — the Pulitzer Prize-winning writer of “August: Osage County.” However she does promise “an intimate look into a really visceral and personal a part of our lives,” she stated.
“I hope you stroll away impressed.”
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