Beset By Coronavirus, NYC Man Rides A Lonely Roller Coaster

GLEN OAKS, QUEENS — The day that Olan Montgomery was hospitalized with a fever and breathing problems, cases of the new coronavirus in New York City were in the single digits.

Two visits to a doctor had yielded little more than a directive to rest and drink fluids, but Montgomery suspected something more than a cold or the flu was to blame for his malaise. He could feel it in his lungs. So, the evening of March 6, he went to the emergency room.

By the next morning, he was on a ventilator in intensive care.

In the final month of his life, the 56-year old would veer in and out of critical condition. He would open his eyes. He would make it off the ventilator.

It is a story that has grown all too familiar as the pandemic has suffocated New York City — a person's sudden plunge into critical condition, the slow climb to stable, only to lurch down again. This is the roller coaster that plays out in the ICU. The doctors and nurses do their best to keep that person safe during the ride, but his loved ones can't sit next to him and squeeze his hand if everything turns upside down. They can only watch. They can pray. They wait.

On April 4, the day Montgomery died, he was one of nine coronavirus deaths at Long Island Jewish Medical Center. Over the next week, the hospital would see another 61 deaths wrought by the virus. It was New York's deadliest week since the outbreak began.

The statistics tell stories, but they don't capture the life that came beforehand.

Montgomery was an actor, a photographer, a painter and a make-up artist. His name may not ring a bell, but his face was a familiar one: as a newsman in the TV show "Stranger Things," as an Irish bartender in the show "Boardwalk Empire," as a security guard in the movie "The Roads Not Taken," among other supporting roles.

He created mixed-media portraits of famous figures like Rufus Wainwright and Courtney Love. He painted the women who worked in his local Chase branch in Greenwich Village, remarking to a New York Times reporter in 2003, "They're just wonderful people. But people forget, because they go to the bank and they just do their thing, and sometimes they have to wait in line, and they talk down to them. Or they talk a certain way where they don't see the person as an individual."

Montgomery was a loving person who saw beauty in everything, family members say. During a show of his work in 2011, his mother recalled, a homeless man walked into the gallery and was asked to leave. Montgomery intervened and said the man was welcome.

As his identical twin, Tom, an army veteran who lives in Georgia, put it, "I did Iraq, did all these things for the country, but I think he did more. He just cared for his fellow man."

It's not clear when exactly Montgomery's story intersected with that of the coronavirus pandemic. He became sick sometime in early March, when local health officials were still under the impression that there was little-to-no community transmission of the virus. While Montgomery had read a little about the virus on the news and feared he had it, as his brother recalled, doctor after doctor assured him that wasn't the case.

He was diagnosed with double-bronchial pneumonia and put on a ventilator in Manhattan's Lenox Hill Hospital. Two days into his hospital stay, a doctor called the family and said there was little more they could do.

An ambulance rushed him to Long Island Jewish Medical Center in northeastern Queens, where he could be placed on an ECMO machine, an aggressive form of life support that takes over for a patient's heart and lungs. (Montgomery never went on the device, according to his brother, though it's unclear why.)

“They kept telling me, 'No, it’s not the virus, it’s not the virus,' for days,” his twin, Tom, said in a phone interview.

His test for the coronavirus came back positive the morning of March 9. He had become one of just 20 confirmed cases of the coronavirus in New York City, according to City Hall's official tally that evening.

A member of the city's health department called Tom in an effort to identify the people with whom his twin brother had come into contact, he recalled, but then he never heard from the agency again.

The next day, March 10, a doctor called Tom and advised him to come see his brother while he could. He drove through the night, all the way from Savannah, Georgia, just to stand on the other side of the glass shielding his twin's hospital room. A nurse handed him a speaker so he could say goodbye.

But, over the next three weeks, Montgomery held on. Tom kept a diary that recorded his twin's ups and downs in painstaking detail — dialysis to keep his kidneys from shutting down, fentanyl for the pain, every time the hospital changed the percentage of oxygen delivered by his ventilator.

He called the hospital three times a day for updates, until they limited calls to once a day. Hospitals started barring most visitors in an effort to prevent further spread of the virus, which placed the Montgomery family among those now learning to cope from afar.

"You have to call and wait, and they say hold on, and sometimes they let you stay on there 'til the phone dies," he said. "The only time they seem to call you is when they have bad news."

The twins' sister delivered each update to their mother in person, so she could hold her hand as they prayed.

The last time Tom spoke to his twin was over FaceTime. His brother was still unable to talk, but he seemed calm. A nurse said Montgomery was doing well; she'd asked him if he was afraid, and he shook his head. They took him off his ventilator and moved him from the ICU to a step-down unit, where hospitals move patients who are improving and starting to breathe on their own.

"They can get more physical therapy and we can use our ICU beds for patients who are on ventilators," said a spokesperson for Northwell Health, which runs Long Island Jewish Medical Center. "Usually people are doing better and need less monitoring."

The morning of April 4, as the hospital workers made their rounds, they found him unresponsive. When his family received his death certificate weeks later, riddled with errors, the time of death read 8:05 a.m., though Tom said he feels he'll never be sure what may have happened overnight.

"I just don’t know what happened on that floor,” he said.

The only certainty in Tom's mind is that his brother was alone.

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