'I am a miracle': Wyandanch grandmother shares story of COVID-19 recovery, hope
Alisa White had taken a turn for the worse and her chances for survival were dropping with every hour.
It was Jan. 6, and the Wyandanch grandmother, who had survived a battle with COVID-19, was now facing a severe bout of potentially life-threatening pancreatitis after the virus caused massive damage to her pancreas.
After suffering a seizure and sustaining 15 electrical cardioversion shocks to treat abnormal heart rhythms, White was transferred to Huntington Hospital where doctors performed a procedure to clean an infection that formed in her pancreas. Seven follow-up endoscopic surgeries would be performed to further treat the infection.
More than seven months after the initial procedure, White — now healthy and on the road to a full recovery — and the doctors that saved her life gathered together at Huntington Hospital Tuesday to share her story of hope and survival.
"I am a miracle and I am here," said White, 61, who has five children and 11 grandchildren, two of whom attended Tuesday's news conference bearing homemade get-well cards. "So many people died of COVID and I could have been one of them. I just thank God but I am heartbroken that I could have died."
Dr. Demetrios Tzimas, director of advanced endoscopy at Huntington Hospital, said White's chances of survival in January were less than 10%.
"She's really a walking miracle," said Tzimas, adding that White had the worst case of pancreatitis among COVID patients that he's ever treated.
White believes she contracted COVID-19 treating a resident at Our Lady of Consolation Nursing & Rehabilitative Center, a West Islip nursing home where she worked for 25 years as an assistant nurse.
White's daughter Tanisha Morris, also of Wyandanch, said within a week of her COVID-19 diagnosis, her mother's condition began to deteriorate. She could not walk, speak or identify her children and grandchildren. And the family could not be together in person because of the contagious nature of the virus.
White would spend months at Southside Hospital in Bay Shore trying to beat back coronavirus.
"God kept me hopeful," Morris said. "We prayed. It's all we could do to keep up that kind of hope … We had to keep praying."
But the pancreatitis proved complicated. White's pancreas, Tzimas said, was essentially dead and causing a massive infection.
"She was hanging on to life," he said.
Tzimas would perform a cyst-gastrotomy, cutting a hole in White's stomach from the outside to drain the dead pancreas tissue. But the infection was so large that Tzimas' equipment could not drain the infection appropriately.
He called in Dr. Anthony Armetta, the hospital's director of interventional radiology, who placed drains outside of White's body to access the infected areas.
"It was one of the worst pancreatitis cases I've seen in terms of the extent of damage," Armetta said.
The procedure was ultimately a success and White was soon taken off the ventilator.
After months of rehab and follow-up surgeries, White is now caring for herself, playing again with her grandchildren and ready to go out to dinner — courtesy of a steakhouse gift card gifted to her by the Huntington doctors.
"I am a little stronger and am trying to walk better. I really thank you very much for saving my life," White told Tzimas and Armetta. "I could have died. So many times I could have died … But you stood up for me and saved my life."
Robert Brodsky is a breaking news reporter who has worked at Newsday since 2011. He is a Queens College and American University alum.
