The Survivor – nj.com

It had been a month since Stickles, a beloved and well-known high school president, was admitted to Valley Hospital in Ridgewood with COVID-19.

It had been a month since his wife, who thought her husband of 25 years only needed oxygen and would be home the next day, collapsed in half from the gut-punch of a doctor’s six words:

“Your husband is in critical condition.”

But for Stickles?

“I thought it was the next day,” he says, “like Rip Van Winkle.”

Despite being naked, confused, and facing a strange man in what looked like a spacesuit, he was, well, in a great mood when he opened his eyes again in late April.

It was March when Stickles’ family, friends and wide circle of acquaintances began to fear the worst for the 71-year-old with pre-existing heart conditions. For them, and for all the people they would talk to about the silent, invisible threat, Stickles was early and undeniable proof of its destructive power.

Stickles was one of the longest-term COVID-19 patients at Valley Hospital. He was not expected to live. Today, he celebrates his 72nd birthday.

It took 76 days on a ventilator and 99 days total for him to be able to go home again, but it might take the rest of his life, Stickles says, for him to figure out why he was spared.

Stickles is pretty sure of when he contracted COVID-19.

He’s an educator turned lawyer turned educator again, who got his J.D. at Rutgers, his doctorate in education at Columbia and graduated from Princeton before all that.

He’s become a pinch hitter for the Newark and Paterson archdioceses, filling in when a Catholic school needs a leader. His most recent gigs were as president at DePaul Catholic in Wayne and Morris Catholic in Denville.

But when it comes to high school sports, Stickles is loyal to his alma mater, the basketball powerhouse that is Roselle Catholic, where he also served as principal, then president and now volunteers as president emeritus. He rarely misses a game.

And March 11 was an epic game — the state sectional championship in Elizabeth against Gill St. Bernard, Stickles says as his eyes light up, and he retells it like a broadcaster.

“You had to see it,” he gushes, explaining Roselle Catholic was down by 10 in the last five minutes, but rallied, eventually ahead by a single point with a minute on the clock.

“The opposing team decided to hold the ball and take the last shot to either win or lose,” Stickles says. “And that minute … the packed gym, the place was going nuts. They got a shot with 10 seconds left, missed it, got the rebound, another shot with three seconds left, missed that shot, and the buzzer goes ERRR! We win.”

It was a time before lockdown, “before anybody was wearing one of these,” Stickles says, pointing to his mask.

Days later, the tournament would be canceled, and schools would be closed.

Stickles says, of the Roselle Catholic fans at the game that night, 10 contracted COVID-19.

It started slowly.

In the weeks after the game, Stickles’ only symptoms were fatigue, not feeling like himself and loss of appetite.

He visited his doctor twice and was tested for the virus, but had to wait for results. Stickles was convinced it was just a bad cold. Vicki wasn’t so sure.

On March 25, over a video call, the doctor told him if it was COVID-19, to be aware it could quickly take a turn for the worse.

“And boy, did it,” Stickles says.

The next day, Vicki noticed his labored breathing and convinced him to get checked out again. That’s when a physician’s assistant told them Stickles’ blood oxygen was so low, he needed to go to the hospital immediately. She said he would need a breathing treatment but would likely be home the next day.

Stickles has only a few memories of that day. He doesn’t remember the ambulance ride, but does remember that his pants almost fell off as he walked to it, a foreshadowing of the 50 pounds he would eventually lose.

In their last conversation before doctors put him in a coma, Stickles told his wife, Vicki, “Well, I guess this was worse than we thought.”

From her car in the hospital parking lot, Vicki called their three adult children and broke the news. Their daughter, Cristin, offered to come stay with her, but Vicki didn’t want to expose her to the virus.

Instead, Vicki went back to their home in Glen Rock, where she quarantined for two weeks, alone, suffering symptoms herself, while crying and praying and crying and praying that she would see her husband alive again.

In the first weeks after he was admitted, Vicki says she felt like she was going crazy. She couldn’t watch the news, and then TV altogether, since COVID-19 advisories would appear in the commercials.

She called Valley four times a day and took detailed notes of his stats — level of oxygen support, oxygen saturation, blood pressure, heart rate and more. Then she texted daily dispatches to groups of family, friends and colleagues who were worrying about Bob. She also continued to work, virtually, as an elementary school teacher in Franklin Lakes.

Before he woke up in April, Stickles had come close to death several times. His feeding tube gave him a sinus infection, which doctors were only able to diagnose after a CAT scan, but the move from the gurney for the scan almost killed him.

Stickles has atrial fibrillation (AFib), and his heart rate would plummet and then skyrocket — from 30 to nearly 200, he says. Doctors eventually implanted a pacemaker. They feared he would have a heart attack or a stroke, like some COVID-19 patients do.

Each time Stickles needed a procedure, doctors briefed Vicki and their eldest son Brendan on the many, many ways it could all go wrong. The pair would listen, terrified, then give permission to go ahead.

(Stickles was also part of a trial of Remdesivir, an antiviral, though he doesn’t know if it made a difference in his recovery.)

Stickles would get better and then worse again, a rollercoaster ride for those on the outside.

“It spooks me to say this out loud, but it’s the truth,” he says. “I was expected to die, as were a number of other people at Valley Hospital at that time, most of whom, other than me, did.”

In subtle and sometimes not subtle ways, hospital staff told Vicki her husband was not likely to make it.

She prayed nightly with her mother over the phone, she prayed to St. Rita, the saint of the impossible, to Pope John Paul II, because he was once on a ventilator. She prayed the rosary and the Surrender Novena, which ends by repeating, “Oh my Jesus, I surrender myself to you, take care of everything.”

Whenever Bob faced a tricky procedure, his sisters would meet Vicki on the front lawn to pray with her. On rainy days, they sat in the tailgates of their cars. Friends brought her groceries, home-grown tomatoes, whatever they could think of.

“It certainly sent the fear of god through my family, through my husband, through my children,” says Vicki’s friend Linda Hay. “Suddenly, it all became very real and very serious and my 20-year-old was more willing to wear a mask. … It was easy to see how other people might not take it as seriously, because you needed to really know someone to understand how devastating it is.”

Vicki’s most harrowing moment was when a nurse told her, “I hope I don’t have to call you during the night…”

“Why would you have to call me during the night?” she pleaded, incredulous at the implication.

Then she lay in bed, clutching a cross a friend brought back from Jerusalem, “shaking like a leaf,” and bracing for a call that never came.

It was April 25 when the technician giving Stickles a sponge bath stuck his head out of the room and yelled to the nurses’ station, “He’s awake! He’s awake!”

“Do you know how long you’ve been here?” a doctor asked, before trying to catch Stickles up on the month of his life he missed.

Because of the trach, Stickles could only mouth replies or nod. They gave him a whiteboard, but his hand muscles were so atrophied he couldn’t hold a marker. Then they put the marker in his mouth and held up the board, but that just didn’t work, he says.

Eventually, nurses were able to guess words as he mouthed them slowly, exaggerating, like a man shouting from behind glass.

“A doctor said, ‘You got COVID, you had a rough go of it, we decided to put you in a coma to help you stabilize and that appears to have worked,’” Stickles remembers. “‘You’re alive, you’ve got a lot of work to do, but it’s doable, and with luck, you can return to some version of your previous life.’”

He was flabbergasted. Until that moment, he never believed he had the virus.

“I’m sort of an ‘it ain’t gonna happen to me’ kind of guy,” Stickles says. “I thought I had a cold or the flu.”

It would take weeks for Stickles to understand how sick he was, to learn of the many times he almost died, and to begin to grapple with why he woke up when so many others like him didn’t.

Vicki had become close with one of the nurses, Nancy Rioux, who often cared for her husband.

Rioux, a nurse for 41 years, was one of many hospital employees who volunteered to transfer departments to help with COVID-19 patients.

“You had to take each individual patient and find out what it was that worked with them,” Rioux says. “He ran extremely high temperatures. We just couldn’t get his oxygen up some days. … It was touch and go with him every single day.”

She credits engineers who put pipes through room walls so IV drips could be extended to the outside, which allowed nurses to administer medication without entering.

In morning briefings, Valley staff celebrated every extubation, every patient transferred out of critical care or discharged, says Julie Karcher, vice president of administration.

“Every single one of them was a victory,” Karcher says, noting that very few ICU patients made it out of the ICU. “So really, he was remarkable in how far he’s come. It’s just a joy.”

After Stickles came to, Rioux helped Vicki FaceTime with him for the first time. She washed Stickles’ hair, gave him a shave, then sat him up, holding the iPad above his trach, so Vicki would just see his face.

“It was startling because he looked very bloated,” Vicki says. “And he just lay there, he couldn’t talk, he couldn’t move. What kept going through my mind was he’s always said, ‘I’ll never want to be a vegetable, so if there’s ever a decision to be made…’”

She wondered whether her husband was still in there.

Stickles looked back at his wife through the screen, silent, but then he pursed his lips and began to blow her kisses.

When nurses first propped Stickles on the edge of his bed, a test to see if he could sit on his own, he fell over sideways.

“That’s when I said to myself, ‘Oh boy, I’ve got a long way to go,’” he remembers.

Like other COVID-19 patients, he had some delusions, believing his vivid coma dreams were real — that his brother-in-law’s wife was dead, that his best friend had been elected president and he was VP, that Vicki had been attacked and brought to the Essex County morgue, but was actually still alive, if only someone would go check on her.

On May 21, Stickles was moved to a long-term care facility, Select LTACH in Rochelle Park, where he was weaned off the ventilator. It would take another 20 days.

At 3:30 a.m. one night, he mouthed to the nurses that he wanted to leave and it was within his rights to do so. When they called Vicki, she was panicked and said, “You know he’s a lawyer, right?”

After a scolding from her and his son, Stickles relented. He says, save for that day, he was a good patient.

When they finally removed his trach, Stickles worried his vocal cords could be permanently damaged, or his voice gone completely, but was relieved when he first spoke and sounded like himself.

A doctor welcomed him back “to the world of the talking.”

Then he FaceTimed Vicki.

He decided to do something he often used to do: When she said hello, he pulled his best Stevie Wonder impression, singing, “I just called…to say…I love you.”

“She melted into her shoes!” Stickles says. “I was so proud of myself. I thought, ‘Nice move, Bob.’”

With rehab facilities full and insurance no longer covering his care at Select LTACH, Vicki was told her husband might be moved to a nursing home for the remainder of his recovery. She and Brendan fought hard to keep him out of a nursing home because the facilities were being ravaged by the pandemic, and eventually were able to get him into Kessler Rehabilitation Center in Saddle Brook.

On June 12, the Stickles were reunited for a fleeting moment amid the transfer. From the stretcher, Bob waved with one hand and reached out for Vicki with the other.

“I just ran to him and grabbed it,” she says, tearing up. “It was heaven.”

Now 50 pounds lighter, Stickles was shocked to see his calf muscles “hanging off his shinbones.” He says he looked like a scarecrow.

The first day he tried to stand, bracing on parallel bars, he says, “I couldn’t even get my rear end up an 1/8th of an inch.” He felt defeated, but the therapist promised if he worked hard, he would improve.

Ever a good student, Stickles made quick progress — relearning not only how to walk, but how to swallow, get in and out of a car, put on socks and other “activities of daily living.”

After 92 days apart, the first time Vicki and Bob got to spend more than a few seconds together was a week before he was released, when she came to Kessler to learn how to assist him.

Stickles can still picture her coming down the hallway. They hugged and cried, then sat together, holding hands.

“We both realized, independently of each other, that the fact that she was there to watch me practice meant we were really going home,” Stickles says. “And to see her, after everything she had been through, was just terrific. This has been way more than I deserve. You can’t imagine what this woman has done for me. You just can’t imagine it.”

And there was another bit of joy when Brendan, his wife and their three grandchildren came to the house to give Vicki a box with a leash and dog food inside.

The card read: “Thank you for taking such good care of Grandpa Bob. Now, here’s something to take care of you,” signed by the grandchildren.

In their car, was a two-month-old cockapoo puppy. Their granddaughter Megan, a Sherlock Holmes fan, named him “Watson.”

At Kessler, one of Stickles’ doctors noticed his Roselle Catholic t-shirt and asked if he was Catholic.

When Stickles said yes, the doctor said “me too,” then added, “You were spared for a reason. It’s your job to figure out what that is. What’s your purpose? Because it’s not an accident.”

“I’m struggling with it, but I’m coming to believe there is a purpose I have to figure out,” Stickles says, “which, by the way, is something of a daunting challenge.”

As far as doctors can tell, Stickles’ body hasn’t suffered any permanent damage. He still sometimes struggles with swallowing and with his hands, saying he writes like a fourth grader. He uses a cane when walking outside or on steps. But he’s putting on weight, which he credits to Vicki’s cooking and his sister-in-law’s potato salad.

He’s waiting for the hospital bills, but says he’s grateful for good insurance, “otherwise we’d be on a boat to Brazil.”

Vicki picked up her husband on July 2 and drove him two miles to their home, where family, friends, neighbors, their priest, church parishioners and his drinking buddies from the Glen Rock Inn had gathered to surprise him.

“That was the first time I had been outside since March 26 … and I looked around and it was just wonderful,” Stickles says, before choking up. “The trees and the grass and the flowers, just fantastic. And for a couple of minutes, I couldn’t get out of the car. I just felt so lucky. Like, how did I get so lucky? What did I do to deserve this?”

He describes the day as “like being at your own wake, without having to go through the inconvenience of dying.” His daughter calls him “Lazarus.”

Stickles’ younger son, Patrick, 35, front man for acclaimed Jersey punk-rock band Titus Andronicus, came home to help care for his father. He was there for the homecoming, and says he isn’t surprised so many people love his dad.

“He’s a big-hearted guy and he really wants to help people,” Patrick Stickles says. “He seems to think he has a great many blessings in life, and indeed he does, and so he recognizes that to those whom much is given, much is expected.”

He says his father would always say he couldn’t wait to retire from law and “do the Lord’s work.”

Stickles has helped unwed mothers from a local shelter get their GEDs. He began an annual charity sale of third world goods at their church, St. Catharine’s, raising more than $50,000 for Catholic Relief Services over 13 years. He was a regular at Eva’s Kitchen in Paterson, a soup kitchen turned nonprofit that helps those struggling with poverty, addiction and mental illness.

And Stickles rarely turns down an ask. At Morris Catholic, there’s a junior college where young nuns from Africa and elsewhere would come to study. When they nuns struggled with western philosophy, Stickles was enlisted to tutor them.

“You haven’t struggled until trying to tutor somebody who is reading Plato in her fourth language!” he says with a laugh. They all passed and went on to four-year colleges.

Patrick says his father doesn’t give his time “begrudgingly,” but does so simple because he loves people.

“He treats everybody with warmth and respect, and he takes time, and makes people feel special and feel seen and makes them feel important. And people like that,” Patrick says.

“It’s nice to see that people have short memories, but a lot of people remember when my father was nice and generous to them, and now they’re trying to repay him, as much as they can. And I think it’s great he’s around to see it. People don’t always get their flowers while they can smell them, you know?”

When Stickles grew strong enough to climb the stairs of his house, he headed for the room his grandchildren call “the big book room” — his thinking room, with books, a desk and comfy chairs — and paused at the door.

“I reached for the doorknob, and I said to myself, ‘I can’t believe, I can’t believe, I’m going to be back in this room,’” he says. “And I turned the knob and pushed the door open, and there it was.”

Four weeks prior, he couldn’t sit up. Now, he sometimes walks around his home, yelling to Vicki about how wonderful something is, like COVID-19′s George Bailey.

“I know it sounds stupid, but it’s for real,” he says. “I look at everything, and I just marvel at it. I really do. I marvel at it.”

They’re still extra careful, worried Stickles is not immune from getting the virus again. Vicki wears a mask whenever she’s around him, and sleeps on an air mattress instead of in their bed.

“He cannot go through this again, I cannot go through this again, so we are extremely careful,” she says. “This disease, it’s killed how many people? 160,000 people? And unfortunately, from what I understand, a lot more to come. So whatever you can do to prevent this horrible disease from happening to you, you should do it. … It’s real. It’s out there. Prevent it.”

Today, August 8, Stickles will celebrate his 72nd birthday with family, friends and his first post-COVID-19 Guinness.

“It’s a birthday I shouldn’t be getting, and I’m getting it,” he says.

“Having come this close to actually dying, I’ve come to understand how much I love to live. … And I have not been sufficiently grateful for all the blessings I’ve had in my life. I have not been sufficiently grateful. And I’m going to work on that.”

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Jessica Remo may be reached at jremo@njadvancemedia.com.