On December 26, 2023, my wife found me in my home office gasping for air and making a terrifying gurgling sound. I had tried using my son’s nebulizer and an old inhaler, but nothing was helping. I could barely breathe.
She rushed me to urgent care, where the staff immediately checked my oxygen level. It was 65 percent, dangerously low. Within minutes, the fire department was called to transport me to the hospital by ambulance.
That is the last thing I remember before everything went dark.
My name is Alex M., and I’m an Acute respiratory distress syndrome survivor from Tulsa, Oklahoma. Before that day, I was a busy dad to two young kids, ages five and seven. I ran my own small business and spent most of my free time being active with my family. I also live with Crohn’s disease, which I manage with immunosuppressant infusions of Remicade. The medication helps control inflammation but also suppresses part of the immune system. My doctors later told me this likely made it harder for my body to fight the infection that followed.
Just before Christmas, I began feeling sick with what seemed like the flu, cough, fever, chills, and body aches. On Christmas morning I felt terrible but still managed to watch my kids open their presents before going back to bed.
A day later, I was fighting for my life.
Doctors discovered I had severe bacterial pneumonia and Influenza A caused by Streptococcus pneumoniae. What started as pneumonia quickly became Sepsis and Acute respiratory distress syndrome, a form of catastrophic lung failure that requires mechanical ventilation and intensive care to survive. My lungs could no longer deliver enough oxygen to my body. My organs began shutting down, and my body went into septic shock. My kidneys failed and I required dialysis in the ICU while doctors tried to stabilize my condition. At one point I even went into cardiac arrest.
My wife and family were told something no family ever wants to hear, that I was critically ill and might not survive.
I was placed into a medically induced coma while doctors fought to keep me alive.
When I eventually woke up about a week later, I was in the ICU surrounded by machines, tubes, and alarms. I was on a ventilator and unable to breathe on my own. A feeding tube and tracheostomy kept me alive while my lungs tried to recover. The hardest days weren’t just the fear, it was the constant physical strain. There was suctioning from the trach, clogged inner canulas, breathing treatments, chest percussion therapy, endless blood draws, and daily CT scans. I had a chest tube inserted when my lung collapsed and procedures where fluid had to be drained from around my lungs with needles through my back.
At the same time, doctors were trying everything they could while also trying to understand why I wasn’t improving as quickly as they hoped.
The hallucinations and nightmares I experienced in the ICU were terrifying and felt completely real. Even after waking, it was difficult to separate dreams from reality. When physical therapy finally began, I was unbelievably weak. I couldn’t lift my head or sit up on my own. It took two therapists just to help me stand for a few seconds.
But even that moment felt like a miracle. Meanwhile, my wife was holding our entire world together. She cared for our two children, kept the household running, and visited me whenever she could, all while facing the possibility that I might not survive.
After about a month in the ICU, I was finally stable enough to move to a respiratory ward. I was off the ventilator but still dependent on oxygen. What I didn’t realize at the time is that surviving ARDS is only the beginning. The lungs and body often need weeks or months to recover after the crisis has passed.
During that time, I developed severe complications in my lungs, including Necrotizing pneumonia, where infection destroys lung tissue. Surgeons eventually had to perform a thoracotomy to remove infected and damaged areas of my lung. The surgery and recovery were incredibly painful, but slowly things began to improve.
After more than two months in the hospital, I was transferred to another facility where my tracheostomy and feeding tube were finally removed. For the first time in weeks, I could speak and eat again.
After weeks of uncertainty and machines keeping me alive, seeing my children again was one of the most emotional moments of my life—and the moment I truly realized I had survived. I was discharged nearly three months after my wife first found me struggling to breathe.
Recovery didn’t end there. I spent about seven months in physical therapy, much of it focused on repairing severe weakness and nerve damage in my right shoulder, which had become partially paralyzed during my hospital stay. Even after therapy ended, I forced myself to keep going, continuing to train in the gym and pushing through fatigue, discomfort, and doubt. None of it came easily. But slowly, piece by piece, my strength began to return.
One of the most meaningful milestones in my recovery has been swimming. During the worst days of my illness, when my lungs were failing and my shoulder could barely move, I could never have imagined that I would one day swim again. Today I swim several times a week (up to 90 laps!) as part of my recovery and as a reminder of how far I’ve come.
Surviving critical illness can also change a person in ways families may not expect. Some survivors want to talk about what happened, while others prefer not to revisit those memories. For me, sharing my experience has been an important part of healing. I hope to continue advocating for patients and survivors whenever I can.
If there is one message I want to share, it’s this: if something feels seriously wrong with your breathing, don’t wait to seek medical help. Looking back, I sometimes wonder if going to urgent care even a day earlier might have changed how severe my illness became. I’ll never know for sure, but it’s something I encourage others to consider.
Surviving Acute respiratory distress syndrome changed how I see life. It stripped everything down to what truly matters, family, health, and time. I shouldn’t be here today.
But I am.
And every breath I take now is a reminder of how precious life really is.
My Second Breath, By Alex M., Tulsa, Oklahoma