Forever Changed

Trevor Conkey, Coweta’s COVID-19 Patient No. 1

Written by MARTY M. HOHMANN
Photos courtesy of THE NEWNAN TIMES-HERALD

Grantville's Trevor Conkey beat COVID-19 last spring.

“Do you trust me?” he asked.

Again, “Do you trust me?”

A third and final time, God said, “Do you trust me? I’m going to bring you through.”

Grantville resident Trevor Conkey knew the answer and called his wife, Tracey, from his ICU bed at Piedmont Newnan Hospital. He told her he was going forward with being put into an induced coma and allowing a ventilator to do his breathing for him. His final words to her during that phone call last March were, “I love you, and I will see you again.”

Seventeen days later, Conkey, Coweta County’s first COVID-19 case, awoke to a world forever changed by a virus that originated in Wuhan, China.

Conkey’s dilemma probably began in his Uber, which he routinely used to pick up and deliver people to the airport in Atlanta. After he began to experience symptoms of what he believed to be bronchitis, he was treated and released from the hospital. When his symptoms took a dramatic turn for the worse, he knew something was desperately wrong. A phone call from the Centers for Disease Control confirmed the worst. He had COVID-19. 

He was hospitalized for 35 days, from March 9 to April 15.

When Trevor awoke from his medically induced coma, his doctors gave him some interesting news: “When they had finished all the testing and after close consultation with the CDC, the doctors told me I probably had the original strain of the virus.”

Coweta’s No. 1 COVID-19 patient, Trevor became No. 236 in the nation to be treated with Remdesivir. Due to the virulent nature of the original COVID strain, he says his body is teeming with antibodies, even a year later.

While his treatment was difficult and often punishing, his wife was going through a fire of her own, which she meticulously documented in a journal for her husband to read – if he made it through.

“He needed to know that when they took him out of here, I hit my knees, begging God to bring him back to me,” she says. “I needed him to know the loneliness I felt and, in the end, how grateful I was when he came home.”

Both Trevor and Tracey, who never got the virus, have high praise for the medical team at Piedmont Newnan. “Those doctors and nurses were the best,” says Trevor. “They would not give up.”

As Trevor slept, the community rallied around him, his family and the medical professionals at Piedmont Newnan. A prayer vigil was held in the parking lot of the hospital, and one of the nurses made sure Covid Patient No. 1’s room could be easily identified by a large cross that could be seen from below.

“The prayer vigil was fantastic, but I wasn’t awake to see it,” says Trevor. But Tracey did, and she says the way the community, their neighbors and their church supported them throughout Trevor’s hospitalization and since has been an ongoing encouragement.

Trevor celebrated his 54th birthday while hospitalized, just a few days after waking up.

TOP : Trevor Conkey undergoes rehab after spending 17 days in an induced coma during treatment for COVID-19.

ABOVE : While fatigue and other lingering symptoms of COVID-19 remain, Trevor Conkey is thankful for life after battling the virus last spring.

“The medical staff made a huge birthday card and put a birthday tiara on me with little fuzzy balls on top that was supposed to be COVID,” he recalls with a laugh. “And they brought me a big chocolate cake and a six-pack of Pepsi, which got us in trouble with my doctors because my blood sugar was high. But I loved it.”

Trevor describes his medical team as compassionate and caring. They played his favorite praise and worship music, which he says kept him going. They called his wife and put the phone up to his ear so he could hear her voice. And they told him over and over to fight.

And he did.

“I was just blown away by what happened while I was asleep,” he says of awakening from the two-and-a-half week coma. The nation had put up a “Closed” sign. People were hunkering down and trying to discern how to ride out the storm. And a battered Trevor Conkey began his long road to recovery.

Thirty-five pounds lighter and unable to walk on his own due to muscle atrophy were just two of the changes that had taken place. Prior to COVID-19, Trevor considered himself a relatively healthy man.

“Everything he’s experiencing now, he didn’t have before,” says Tracey, adding that the unpredictability of the virus is one of its hallmarks. He has blinding headaches, which he describes as a moving fire in his head, and impaired vision. His lungs are scarred and operate at a reduced capacity, similar to COPD. He now has diabetes, which is severe and requires pills and insulin shots. Add to that fibromyalgia pain, tremors in his hands, and blood clots.

“And the fatigue is crazy,” says Trevor. “They don’t know why I’m having the symptoms I’m having.”

Trevor, however, doesn’t complain because he knows what’s important.

“Our faith has carried us through,” says Tracey.

One time the pastor of a church in Newnan, Trevor admits that he and his wife experienced a crisis of faith in years past. But in the months before COVID-19, the Conkeys began attending Change Church in Grantville. They agree that God was looking out for them and that they need him more than ever. In return, they have shared their COVID-19 experience with people from all over the country, giving them an opportunity to minister through their testimony, according to Trevor.

Trevor says he plans to return to the ministry and though his life is forever changed, one truth remains: God is ever-present.

“I have two scriptures that really apply to everything we are going through: Psalm 91 and Joshua 1:9, which says, ‘Have I not commanded you, fear not,’” says Trevor. “It’s become my life verse.”

NCM