CLEVEVELAND – Bianca Arnold is happy to be home for the holidays.
In the fall of 2021, the mother of two spent 40 days in a coma due to COVID complications.
“I woke up right before Thanksgiving with tubes connected to me,” Bianca recalled. “It’s weird losing a whole big chunk of time and not knowing what happened and having to get filled in by others.”
She contracted the virus just two weeks after having her second daughter.
The nurses at Cleveland Clinic remember when she first arrived.
“The team instantly knew from the report that she was a new mother to her second daughter, so it was one of those feelings of like we have to do everything to get her home to her children,” said Daelle Gearhart, MSN, RN, nurse manager for Cleveland Clinic.
It was touch and go for a while, but ultimately Bianca pulled through.
“Coming home was surreal, wonderful, but surreal,” she said.
Recently, she was able to thank the staff who saved her life.
“Something in me knew that in order to heal, I needed to give gratitude to those who saved my life,” Bianca explained.
The reunion left her in tears.
“Everybody as a whole is why I am still here, why I get to watch my daughters grow up,” she said.