Two months after leaving the intensive care unit, Rob Rainer returned to his law practice in Revere, eager to resume his old life after surviving a severe lung infection that tethered him to a breathing machine for a month.
But as he sat down at his desk, the former hard-driving multitasker found he couldn’t stay on track with even one task. Phone conversations left him overwhelmed. He was baffled by a computer program he himself had developed.
Today, five years later, Rainer’s life is very different — his law practice shuttered, his two houses sold. At 58, he lives modestly with his wife in a small condo in Hudson, N.H.
While the novel coronavirus didn’t exist in 2015, today thousands of COVID-19 patients in the United States are enduring the same experience that Rainer did, lying in a medication-induced coma as a ventilator pushes air into their weakened lungs for days or weeks on end. And like Rainer, many will never be the same.

Hundreds of thousands of seriously ill coronavirus patients who survive and leave the hospital are facing a new and difficult challenge:
recovery. Many are struggling to overcome a range of troubling residual symptoms, and some problems may persist for months, years or even the rest of their lives.
Patients who are returning home after being hospitalized for severe respiratory failure from the virus are confronting physical, neurological, cognitive and emotional issues.
And they must navigate their recovery process as the pandemic continues, with all of the stresses and stretched resources that it has brought.
“It’s not just, ʻOh, I had a terrible time in hospital, but thank goodness I’m home and everything’s back to normal,’” said Dr. David Putrino, director of rehabilitation innovation at Mount Sinai Health System in New York City. “It’s, ʻI just had a terrible time in hospital and guess what? The world is still burning. I need to address that while also trying to sort of catch up to what my old life used to be.’”
It is still too early to say how recovery will play out for these patients. But here is a look at what they are experiencing so far, what we can learn from former patients with similar medical experiences, and the challenges that most likely lie ahead.

Drew Patten, who was in the same intensive care unit as Derek Draper tells of the twilight world between life and death where he was convinced doctors were trying to kill him