'Like Being In Hell': Harlem Woman Describes Her COVID-19 Battle

HARLEM, NY — Speaking to Natasha Dyce today, one might have little indication that just over a year ago she was confined to a hospital bed, gripped by weeks of hallucinations during a monthslong bout of COVID-19 that nearly killed her.

Dyce, a Harlem resident in her forties, is now back at her job with PACT Renaissance Collaborative, where she works with NYCHA residents whose buildings are being renovated.

But she cannot forget her coronavirus ordeal, which began in March 2020 when she contracted it, possibly from a coworker. After feeling tired over the weekend, she came to work on a Monday morning feeling "beat up."

She took the week off from work, growing weaker and losing more of her appetite each day. When Dyce called 311 that Friday, having heard that a few sites were testing people for COVID, the operator was taken aback by how Dyce sounded.

"She said, 'I don’t like how you’re breathing — it sounds like you're gasping for air,'" Dyce recalled. When Dyce refused the operator's offer to call 911, the woman promised to call her back the next morning.

By Saturday, Dyce could barely get out of bed. This time, she accepted her mother's plea to call 911, and paramedics arrived to wheel Dyce out of her apartment and into an ambulance.

"I felt like I was just floating away," Dyce said of the ambulance ride. "You can hear voices from a distance but I can’t really make out what they were saying."

"Horrible, horrible hallucinations"

At the hospital, Columbia University Irving Medical Center, staff quickly diagnosed Dyce with COVID-19. Within a day, she began experiencing "horrible, horrible hallucinations."

For five weeks, Dyce lost most of her grip on reality. Some days, she imagined she was being chased through the hospital by an axe-wielding person or a dog. When a breathing tube was inserted into her throat, Dyce thought it was a furry animal that had burrowed inside her.

"It was like being in hell," she said.

During her few moments of clarity, Dyce was painfully aware of her inability to breathe, which felt like "being in a closed area and trying to breathe out of a straw," she said. Sometimes, she imagined she was inside a cage that was steadily tightening around her body.

Once, Dyce found herself surrounded by hospital staff but was unable to tell them what she needed.

"I was begging them to give me oxygen. They couldn’t understand what I needed," she said. "I literally was gasping for air. I’m crying and I’m pleading."

During her worst points, Dyce's oxygen levels dropped to near-fatal lows. Her heart, lungs and other organs began to fail. But after more than a month, Dyce opened her eyes one day and saw a team of nurses at her bedside.

"They were all excited," she recalled. "They said, 'Oh my god, welcome back, Ms. Dyce!'"

"Coming back from the dead"

Though she'd beaten the virus, Dyce soon confronted another challenge: weeks of immobility had atrophied her muscles, leaving her immobile.

"I couldn’t move my toe, I couldn’t move any part of my body," she said. A doctor later told her that each week of immobility was like losing 10 years of muscle mass.

Natasha Dyce built a career putting others first – helping thousands of families in #NYC public housing enjoy an improved way of life. But when #COVID19 made it impossible for her to go on, her care team at #NYP/@ColumbiaMed came to the rescue & gave her a second chance. pic.twitter.com/D3umZXxCV6
— NewYork-Presbyterian (@nyphospital) August 12, 2020

Dyce sobbed when she first realized the severity of her condition. But she felt grateful when she saw her mother for the first time in weeks, and learned that she had been told her daughter would likely not survive.

"It was the strangest feeling," Dyce said. "I wasn't dead, but you feel like you’re coming back from the dead in a sense."

She celebrated small victories, starting when nurses sat her up in bed for the first time — though Dyce was still limp and unable to hold herself upright. She re-learned how to eat, drink and write, after her first attempts on a whiteboard turned out to be "all scribble."

After a remarkably speedy recovery, Dyce left the hospital in mid-May, as hospital staff played the song "Celebration" from the loudspeakers to mark another COVID patient being discharged.

She returned to work virtually last August and in-person at the beginning of 2021. Still, Dyce feels the effects of her illness: breathing is more of a struggle, especially when walking up stairs. Her sense of balance feels off, and her knee is "messed up" from being laid at a slight angle in her hospital bed for weeks.

But Dyce is free from most of the "long-haul" symptoms that plague others who contracted the virus. After joining a Facebook group for fellow survivors, she found that "What I'm going through is nothing" compared to their symptoms, she said.

Now, Dyce revels in her fieldwork, which gives her the chance to help residents of public housing improve their living conditions.

"This is my way of giving back, and my way of just being thankful," Dyce said, tearing up. "It feels amazing to do this, it really does."