Greg Whitehouse hadn’t been feeling well and the day he fell and couldn’t get up last November, his wife called an ambulance. He went to the hospital Friday. By Monday, he couldn’t move or feel anything.
“I was still breathing and my heart was still beating,” he said. “I could talk. That’s all I had.
“I was going insane. I was in isolation because of COVID. I was only seeing people with double masks, double gowns, gloves. It was terrifying. Not only was my body wrecked by the eighth day, I had lost it mentally. I couldn’t sleep anymore. I was so anxious. I wasn’t myself. I didn’t really know where I was the last day, I didn’t know what was going on.”
Whitehouse, 61, of Wallingford was diagnosed with Guillain-Barre syndrome (GBS), a rare autoimmune disease in which the immune system attacks the nervous system and can cause muscle weakness and paralysis. He had had a relatively mild case of COVID-19 earlier in the month, which may have triggered the GBS, he said, or it could have been caused by a flu shot he had in mid-October, a rare possibility.
He went to rehabilitation at Gaylord Hospital and was discharged Jan. 21. Six months later, he came back to Gaylord to run the Gaylord Gauntlet, a 5K obstacle race on the hospital campus grounds, with five of the Gaylord team members who had helped him recover.
“You guys have all been with me the last seven months of therapy and you were here with me today and we made it,” Whitehouse said to his teammates after the race. “I’m shaking. It’s an amazing thing.
“I couldn’t see it seven months ago when I was just lying there. I couldn’t even imagine it in my wildest dreams.”
Whitehouse spent Thanksgiving at MidState Medical Center in Meriden before he was transferred to Gaylord, where he spent Christmas and most of January.
“When he first got here, he was blinking for responses,” said Kate Donahue, Whitehouse’s outpatient physical therapist who competed with Whitehouse Saturday. “He couldn’t talk. He would blink once for yes, twice for no.
“Just to see him without a walker was amazing. Then when we practiced for [the race], he started off running toward the obstacle we were going to practice, I was just amazed.”
The race, which had teams of competitors starting in waves throughout the morning and early afternoon, consists of 22 obstacles, including crawling under wires in mud (Whitehouse had a cut over his eye from running into a wire), climbing over walls and rocks and swinging on a rope swing over water.
Whitehouse had never heard of the race until he ended up at Gaylord. But then again, he had never heard of GBS. If the disease is treated in time, the effects can be reversible but depending on how severe it is, they can also be permanent.
“Initially when he first came to Gaylord, he had very little muscle strength in his legs and arms,” said C.J. Connors, one of Whitehouse’s inpatient physical therapists who also raced with him Saturday. “We worked on a lot of strengthening and retraining the brain, to figure out how to coordinate muscle movement. Especially with the GBS diagnosis, it was important to not overfatigue the muscles; that could lead to more muscle weakness. It was finding a good balance of strengthening and getting enough rest.”
Whitehouse still goes to outpatient therapy. He has loss of sensation in his feet and his left leg isn’t as strong as his right leg.
“When I started physical therapy, I was sitting in a wheelchair, just trying to get my foot off the floor,” he said. “Just trying to remake the connection from my brain to my foot.
“Your body just starts to fix itself, slowly but surely. I lost like 20 pounds. I’m in better shape now than when I went to the hospital.”
He had run a marathon in his 30s and done a Ragnar relay race in 2019, but Whitehouse is not a regular runner. He became one while training for the Gauntlet. He returned to his job as an engineer six weeks ago.
He was thankful Saturday for everyone who helped him when he was in the hospital. His wife Sharon, who couldn’t visit him due to COVID, talked to him on the phone multiple times a day and organized Zoom calls with family members.
“At my lowest point, it was bad,” he said. “When I went to sleep in the hospital that Monday night [after his Friday admission], I thought I was done. ‘I think they all deserted me,’ That’s what I told [Sharon]. ‘They left me here to die.’ I had lost all comprehension of what was going on around me.”
“I’d call her at 3 in the morning,10 at night. Just sitting there wallowing in my own desperation and she would just talk to me. She was remarkable.”
So, he said, were the people at Gaylord.
“I can put my shoe on today, I can get dressed – things you take for granted when your health is good. I have a whole new perspective on what PT and OT is and what it does for people. I’m in awe of people who have a life-changing event and they overcome it.
“Even though some part of them may be different, they get past it and overcome it and move on. I’m in awe of them now. What effort it really takes. It’s not easy.”
Lori Riley can be reached at lriley@courant.com.
