Kiara Hearn stood in her kitchen using all of her strength to slice a Gala apple.
The 29-year-old couldn’t do it.
Hearn told her mom — with whom she lives and was awaiting results from a coronavirus test she had taken days earlier — that she needed to go to the hospital.
Struggling to breathe, the Irving resident dropped her knife and drove 15 minutes to Parkland Memorial Hospital in Dallas. Burning with fever, she couldn’t remember when she had last combed her hair or brushed her teeth.
She parked her car near the emergency room on March 26 and gasped for oxygen the entire walk to the front door. She was out of breath by the time she reached the lobby.
A nurse took Hearn’s vitals and swiftly moved her to a makeshift emergency room reserved for patients believed to be suffering from the virus. They ran more tests. Hearn was placed on an IV and breathing machine.
She wouldn’t breathe on her own for nearly two weeks.
Hearn is one of the thousands of Dallas County residents who have tested positive for Covid-19, the disease caused by the coronavirus making its way around the world.
In 2018, Hearn, who is black, was diagnosed with lupus, an autoimmune disease that causes the body to attack healthy tissues. Earlier this year, she got more bad news: She was suffering from a paralysing shingles outbreak.
While most infected with the coronavirus suffer only minor symptoms, it is especially cruel to those living with underlying medical conditions such as diabetes and hypertension. And data suggests it has disproportionately killed black Americans. For instance, one federal report found that black residents of New York City died at twice the rate of their white peers.
Despite a long history of racial inequities, it appears the virus is so far afflicting residents here proportionally. About 21% of all Covid-19 patients hospitalised have been black, according to data released by the Dallas County Health Department on Friday. And so far, 23% of all Covid-19 deaths have been among black residents in a county where they make up a little less than a quarter of its population.
However, it’s unclear how deep the virus is penetrating communities here because in more than half of the total confirmed cases, no racial or ethnic data is available.
Hearn’s story is both emblematic of how the virus is wreaking havoc on Americans and a unique tale of how a woman who came close to dying was brought back, aided by a cache of medical doctors and an experimental treatment.
“Have I cheated death?” Hearn asked. “Why am I alive? It’s the power of prayer and good intentions from all the support team around me.”
A native of northeast Dallas, Hearn attended the School for the Talented and Gifted at Townview. As a child, she told her mom she’d attend an Ivy League school — and she did.
Hearn studied East Asian culture — a lifelong interest — at Yale. As part of her coursework, she spent nearly a year travelling China, Taiwan, Japan and South Korea. Along the way, she picked up a collection of face masks, each embroidered with Kitty White, a popular Japanese cartoon character also known as Hello Kitty.
After graduating in 2013, Hearn moved back to North Texas to live with her mom and pursue a career in education. For several years, she worked in and out of classrooms. Unable to find her niche in education, Hearn made a career leap to technology.
Taking the advice of a friend, she began working remotely for a California-based company, Outreach Grid, which builds software for government and nonprofit organisations that help homeless people.
For the past two years, Hearn has had to learn how to live with lupus, a chronic illness that affects people differently. Symptoms range from muscle aches to fevers. For Hearn, a common lupus complication is a buildup of fluid around her heart, which must be drained medically.
Even before Covid-19 attacked her body, Hearn was usually tired and her joints ached.
“There’s no end,” she said.
In January, Hearn was also diagnosed with Ramsay Hunt, a shingles outbreak that paralysed the left side of her face and impaired her hearing in one ear. She went on unpaid medical leave from her job as an engineer, which included account management, training and technical support. Doctors told Hearn that most people regain control of their face and hearing within five months.
“It’s been five months, and I haven’t seen any progress,” Hearn said.
The first day at Parkland hospital is a haze for Hearn, who had been combating a constant fever that at times spiked to 104.
However, after being admitted to the hospital, she decided to keep a date to check in with some college friends on Zoom, a video-conference platform. She didn’t want her friends to worry so she decided not to turn on the video function — they could only hear her voice.
After her friends insisted, she came clean and told them what was going on: Her mother, Rhonda Hinton, a Parkland patient financial adviser, was tested for Covid-19, and now Hearn was in the hospital confronting much more severe symptoms. Hinton, 55, suffered from a mild fever and heavy fatigue. At her worst, she felt tired doing household chores.
Since the coronavirus outbreak appeared in Dallas, Parkland has drastically limited family visits. Hearn and her mother spoke most days by phone. She had been in the hospital for about a week when she sent her mother, who learned that she also had tested positive for Covid-19, a video update when she didn’t pick up the phone on April 1.
“Hey, they put me on a new machine,” she said, taking deep breaths between words. “I was just calling to say ‘Hi.’ I’m probably going to go back to sleep because I slept all day. The fever came back. I’m doing OK for the most part. I love you. Bye.”
Her thick black hair was up in a bun. Tubes hung out of her nose.
The eight-second video would be one of the last times Hinton would hear her daughter’s voice for a week. Twenty-four hours later, on April 2, Hearn’s health took a drastic turn. Her breaths became shorter, the level of oxygen in her blood dropped dangerously low.
To help her tolerate the breathing tube that would be forced down her throat, doctors prepared to sedate the young woman. But first, she spoke one more time to her mother. Hinton recalled her last words, “It’s going to be OK, mom.”
“I could see it in her eyes — she just knew she was going to be OK,” Hinton said. “But as a mother, you just think, ‘You’re going to lose my baby.’”
Her mother called every four to six hours. One night, nurses set up a video call so Hinton could see and “pray over” her daughter.
Hearn’s condition did not immediately improve — while she was stable, her fever would not break. So, Parkland doctors called Hinton asking for permission to use an experimental treatment, tocilizumab, a drug commonly used for arthritis.
On March 23, the US Food and Drug Administration approved clinical trials for tocilizumab to be used as a treatment for Covid. Parkland patients are not part of the trial.
The decision to use that drug was also influenced by a suspicion that the Covid infection was causing a flare-up of her lupus, Parkland officials said. Fluid was building up around her heart again, making it hard to function. Tocilizumab is also potentially beneficial in patients with lupus flares.
It was a terrifying conversation, Hinton said, made worse by the fact she couldn’t see or touch her daughter.
“Do whatever you have to do,” Hinton told the doctors.
Shortly after Hinton approved the experimental treatment, Parkland staff called again.
This time they were worried about her daughter’s kidneys. They were in jeopardy due to a confluence of the virus, unstable blood pressure and the medication doctors gave her to regulate it.
If the worst happened, the staff asked, what should they do?
Hinton fell to the floor.
“I just lost it,” she said.
The day Hearn went on the ventilator, her mother began praying. She wouldn’t stop for five days.
As her daughter fought for her life in the hospital, Hinton saw national headlines that reported a high death rate among Covid-19 patients with preexisting conditions and black people.
In between talks with God, Hinton spoke with a large team of nurses, doctors and specialists. They ran different scenarios by her, discussed various medicines. The nurse staff continued to set up Zoom calls so Hinton could see her daughter.
“I would tell her to fight and to breathe,” Hinton said. “She’s always been a fighter. When she was little, she told me she was going to Yale, and she made it there.”
On April 6, doctors removed Hearn’s breathing tube.
At around midnight the next day, Hinton’s phone rang. It was her daughter, awake and breathing on her own.
“It was like birthing her again,” Hinton said.
Hearn was not immediately released. She spent two days in an intensive care unit where she was unable to leave her bed. After nearly 30 years of moving, her body was too tired from its two-week battle with the virus. She lost 50 pounds. She was barely strong enough to hold her phone in her hand to talk with her mother. She ate broth through a straw. She wondered why her life was spared.
“People are dying from this,” she said. “Why am I not?”
She credits the doctors and nurses at Parkland.
“I had people believing me, watching out for me,” she said.
Hearn referred to studies that have found implicit bias among health care professionals can lead to poorer outcomes for black and Latino patients.
“Doctors and nurses need to believe their patients’ pain and investigate it. We have to address that divide,” she said.
And yet, Hearn also can’t help but wonder how her lupus made the fight against Covid more difficult.
“If I didn’t have lupus, who knows? Would Covid have been so bad?” she said. “Sometimes I wonder, maybe I know lupus is going to be the thing I die from. I have to keep it regulated. I have to take my medication.”
After being moved out of the ICU, Hearn began meeting with a physical therapist.
“You have to learn how to breathe again,” she said. “You have to learn how to walk again.”
She could walk, but not very far.
On April 13 — 18 days after she checked herself into the Parkland emergency room — Hearn was released to her home, where she was ordered to isolate for another 10 days. A cough followed her home, and for several days, she still struggled to breathe.
“You feel just a little tired,” she said.
Hearn’s younger brother and aunt brought the isolated pair food. Hearn has passed the time watching Korean dramas such as Itaewon Class, texting and video calling with friends. She has started walking more as she has regained her strength.
And on April 23, the day after her isolation order was lifted, she retrieved her car from the Parkland Hospital parking lot and drove it home on her own — windows down.
“It was so much fun,” she said, reflecting on the drive. “You forget the little things.” — The Dallas Morning News/TNS
ALL’S WELL THAT ENDS WELL: Kiara Hearn, left, and her mother Rhonda Hinton. Both were diagnosed with coronavirus, but have now recovered.
