6 minute read
FROM THE RECORD ONLINE
FROM THE RECORD ONLINE RYAN SENN’S COVID FIGHT
With 250,000+ living alumni and active collegiate members, extraordinary stories come from all corners of Sigma Alpha Epsilon. It would be nearly impossible to highlight them all in each issue, so the staff now shares as many as possible on The Record Online. You don’t need to wait for the magazine to arrive in the mailbox to keep up with the latest news from the Realm.
Visit therecordonline.net/subscribe to sign up for notifications each time a story is posted or for a weekly email digest.
I got the news on November 11. The text followed shortly after.
My husband’s fraternity brother, Ryan Senn (Louisiana Tech ’04) was hospitalized with COVID. He was sick. Really sick.
As I’m writing this, there are nearly 24 million confirmed COVID cases in the United States and nearly 400,000 people who have died from COVID. And that’s only in our country. The pandemic has impacted the entire world. But the horror of COVID doesn’t affect you until it does. I didn’t know anyone who had been hospitalized for COVID, and certainly not someone as young and purposeful as Ryan. He and his family traveled to Zambia in 2016 and 2019 to help orphaned children. He promised them he would be back to see them graduate from high school. This didn’t feel real. When it’s filled with love and kindness instead of hatred and divisiveness, it can literally move machines across the world. This is a story about recovery and resurrection. Resolve and fortitude. And good old-fashioned grit.
This is Ryan’s story, told by him and all of his heroes, who never gave up on their Superman.
On Halloween 2020, Ryan, 40, started feeling sick. He is an assistant supervisor at Louisiana United Methodist Children’s Home and Family Service in Ruston who was taking COVID precautions before it was mandated. In March 2020, right after the quarantine, he sent his friend a picture of himself, masked up, complete with PPE, on his way to the grocery store.
Oh my gosh. Are you OK? I texted Ryan.
Three dots. And then the four words that became my mantra over the next five weeks. “This was really early on,” said Brad Bourgeois, “And I was like, ‘Are you serious?’ I mean no one was wearing all of that to the grocery store, and he said, ‘Yes I am. I don’t want to see you one day through a glass window on a ventilator.’”
...COVID CAN’T KILL SUPERMAN.
Like the mystical Phoenix rising out of the ashes, this is the story about resurgence and life. This story begins and ends with Superman fighting a battle he can only win with support from a world full of superheroes. This is a story about human beings having faith and persistence – about the power of social media. But on Halloween, after an outbreak at the children’s home where eight children had tested positive for the virus, Ryan was afraid he also had it. He told his wife, Sharon, that his body hurt and she laughed it off. Sharon is an emergency room nurse at Northern Louisiana Medical Center in Ruston, a seasoned health care professional, who for the past 10 months has worked with sick COVID patients, and her husband had never even had the stomach flu, much less the real flu. So, the thought of COVID never even crossed her mind.
“I honestly blew it off and laughed at him,” Sharon said. “And when he went to the clinic and got tested, and his test came
back positive, we set up a quarantine spot for him in the house, but I honestly thought he would be fine in a few days.”
Day one and two were body aches. The migraines started on days three and four, and by the sixth and seventh days, Ryan felt much better. In fact, he felt so good, he began cleaning the bathroom because he was so bored in quarantine. But on the eighth day, the respiratory issues began and by the 10th day of COVID, he needed oxygen. Sharon wanted to avoid hospitalizing her husband if possible, so she brought some oxygen to the house to try to stabilize his breathing. But by Day 11 and after talking to some of the doctors she worked with, she brought him to the emergency room at Northern Louisiana Medical Center.
“I knew right away that he was very sick,” said Dr. Aaron Marquardt, a hospitalist at
NLMC. “We started him on all the meds, put him on the high-flow oxygen and put him in isolation for COVID and he wasn’t getting any better.” They put a call out for convalescent plasma, the “liquid gold” that recovered COVID patients can donate. But it never came to Ruston. Senn was hospitalized Wednesday. By Sunday afternoon, he started to rapidly decline. “He was getting out of breath very quickly, he looked gray and he was very anxious about it,” Marquardt said. “It was a panicky situation because he had to be intubated and Sharon really was upset about that. She wanted to avoid putting him on the vent if possible. But I felt helpless for him. I felt like there wasn’t anything I could do, and that was our only option.”
Sharon knew that the vent had become symbolic for the grim reaper. In early COVID hospitalizations, those who went on the vent, often never came off, and most ended up dying.
“The day we intubated Ryan, they were scared he wouldn’t come off of it,” said Abby Puckett, a registered nurse at NLMC. “But he had such a good attitude about everything. Ryan is a very intentional person, very kind and he was always very optimistic about his progress. The very last thing I told him is that he is going to get better. And he did. Ryan is a miracle.
Most definitely. He loves being alive. COVID patients have to want to continue to fight and he did.” On Nov. 15, Ryan was given anesthesia and placed on a ventilator. The next day he was airlifted to Ochsner LSU Health Shreveport, about an hour’s drive from Ruston.
In the midst of the chaos of Ryan being transported to another hospital, behind the scenes an army was building. Shortly after he was hospitalized in Ruston, Sharon began posting about Ryan’s condition on Facebook. She updated. She asked for help, for plasma and for prayers.
When he first arrived at LSU Shreveport, my husband, Luke Myers (Louisiana Tech ’00) reached out to Sharon and asked her what else he could do.
“When I talked to her, I said we were pray-
ing and spreading the word about the plasma, but did she need anything else. She was concerned because she wasn’t working and Ryan wasn’t working and they were worried about paying the house note,” Myers said. “So, I reached out to a private SAE alumni group who I had been updating about Ryan and talked to David Clark (Louisiana Tech ‘01). He is a dentist who has an office in Ruston, across from the hospital and said, ‘Hey man, what do you think about raising money for them? And he said, let’s start a GoFundMe.”
They immediately set one up for Ryan, Sharon and their two girls, Breanna and Shae, and it took off quickly. In two days, they raised nearly $20,000 and have currently raised a total of nearly $40,000. While friends and family quickly responded and donated, SAE brothers banded together to help, too.
...Continue readong at therecordonline.net ◆
