‘It’s a big deal,’ says a Weill Cornell neurologist. The consequences range from mental fog, and mild memory lapses, to severe neurological problems.
After five days on a ventilator because of covid-19, Susham “Rita” Singh seemed to have turned a corner. Around midnight on April 8, doctors at Houston Methodist Hospital turned off the sedative drip that had kept the previously healthy 65-year-old in a medically induced coma.
“The expectation is that you should start waking up after six hours, 12 hours or a day,” said her daughter, Silky Singh Pahlajani, a neurologist in New York City. “But it was six-and-a-half days before she started … opening her eyes. I thought she had suffered a massive stroke.
“Her brain MRI was normal, which was great, but then the question became: What’s going on?” Continue reading.