From RSV to Recovery

Darla Taylor considered herself healthy. She watched what she ate, walked two miles a day and never thought she would be admitted to the hospital with a serious lung infection. But that’s where she found herself in January 2024.

A few weeks earlier, Darla’s father-in-law passed away from Stage 4 Liver Cancer. Having spent weeks in the hospital before his passing, Darla’s mother-in-law contracted a common respiratory virus, RSV, that gave her a cough.

Unfortunately, RSV was passed to everyone in Darla’s immediate family, which was a difficult time to not be feeling well while dealing with planning a funeral.

When Darla returned to work, she too now had a lingering cough that wouldn’t go away, but she didn’t think anything about it. Darla didn’t know she had RSV, but assumed she did. She knew her mother-in-law had RSV from a confirmed positive RSV test.

After having her cough for about a month, one day in January, Darla was sitting at work and suddenly got really cold. She had body aches, chills and couldn’t get warm. It was later in the afternoon, and she called her husband Scott and said she didn’t think she could make it home. Her teeth were chattering, but she went home, went straight to bed and called in sick the next day, Friday.

She went to the emergency room at Boone Hospital Center. A chest x-ray was done which didn’t show anything concerning, so Darla was sent home with instructions to take Tylenol and Ibuprofen.

On Sunday, Darla was feeling even worse. She was having sharp chest pains and was having a hard time breathing. She went back to the Emergency Room and had a CT scan done that showed she had RSV, which had turned into pneumonia. She also had septic fluid in her lungs and an infection in her right lung that was causing the chills and other symptoms.

She was admitted into the hospital. The pneumonia had caused Darla to have pleural effusion, which is an accumulation of excess fluid between the layers of the pleura – thin membranes that line the lungs and the inside of the chest cavity.

Symptoms for pleural effusion can vary, depending on the severity of the excess fluid in the lungs, but Darla remembers every time she would take a breath, it would feel like knives stabbing her in the chest.

With the RSV, pneumonia (the infection in her right lung), and the pleural effusion, Darla’s blood pressure was very high, and her heart was functioning at only 30%.

Darla met with Richard Mellitt, MD of Boone Health Heart Surgery who told her she needed a chest tube to drain the fluid. She was taken into surgery where they put in a chest tube – a flexible plastic tube that is inserted through the chest wall and into the pleural space to remove fluid to help the lungs expand properly. From her infection, Darla had puss pockets in her lungs that Dr. Mellitt was able to scrape out as well.

Over the course of 5 days, they drained almost 2 liters of septic fluid out of Darla’s right lung.

“All of the employees I encountered at the hospital were so kind and went out of their way for me,” Darla said. “The nurses and physical therapists were fantastic”.

Darla had two physical therapists who would come and help walk her, and they would even come up on their lunch breaks just to check on her. “One of them knew I hadn’t washed my hair in 5 days and she asked if she could help me wash my hair – which just brought me to tears. When you’re going through so much, just something so simple means so much,” Darla said. “I really appreciated their kindness.”

After 7 days in the hospital, Darla was released to go home. She was home for two weeks before she could return to work, being gone 3 weeks total.

Darla still had fluid in her right lung, and it took her body a couple of months to absorb the remaining fluid.

Once she got home, Darla looked forward to feeling well enough to exercise and eat again. While she was at the hospital, Darla didn’t eat and lost close to 10 pounds. But when she was finally well enough to eat again, she put her weight back on and is happy to be back walking her two miles every day.

“Dr. Mellitt saved my life by catching the infection,” Darla said. “I’m healthy, I do all the right things. I just couldn’t believe out of everyone in my family that I’m the only one that became so ill. I’m still baffled at how sick I actually was.”

By Erin Wegner