VA Nurse Recovering from COVID After 4 Months in Hospital

Sharon Tapp learned that a severe case of COVID-19 can threaten not only your life but also your sense of self. After a lifetime of good health, COVID transformed Tapp from a busy nurse case manager into a comatose ICU patient attached to a feeding tube and ventilator. Sharon fought for her life for 117 days. By the time she regained consciousness, her world had changed. “I was just like a newborn baby in a diaper,” she says. “I took care of everybody. Now, everybody wants to take care of me.”

At first, 60-year-old Tapp, who works at the VA Medical Affairs Center in Washington. D.C. lost her sense of taste. When she started suffering common COVID symptoms such as headache, chest pain, fever, and chills, she went to an urgent care clinic and was tested. Five days later the clinic informed Sharon that she had tested positive for COVID-19, and her boyfriend took her to their area hospital. After being admitted to the ICU, though, her condition became so serious that doctors transported her by helicopter to Johns Hopkins in Baltimore. There, physicians placed her in a medically induced coma and connected her to a ventilator.

Tapp survived the ventilator, pneumonia, and heart and lung failure before she rallied. Finally, she moved to an acute rehabilitation hospital, where she spent three weeks working to overcome the muscle breakdown and overall physical debility caused by the lengthy time she spent in a coma (she even had to learn how to swallow again).

Her recovery will be slow, as she is facing both physical and cognitive challenges, but Tapp is determinedly pursuing her speech, physical, and occupational therapy. She is using a rolling walker and a quad cane while regaining her sense of balance and building her strength to walk again. Sharon has a powerful goal in view: she is looking forward to her eventual return to the hospital (as a nurse). After all, nursing is part of who she is: “I like helping people. That’s just my nature. I really enjoy when they get better and I have something to do with it.”