I Was A COVID Breakthrough Case. I Nearly Died: Middletown Woman

PORT MONMOUTH, NJ — To date, about 6,000 vaccinated Americans have either died or were hospitalized with COVID-19 in what are called "breakthrough" cases, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Nancy Miller, 62, of Port Monmouth should know. She was one of them.

"I got the Moderna shots in late March. And I was in the hospital for eight days with COVID this July. I almost died," she told Patch on Thursday. "The doctors at Riverview told me the vaccine is what saved my life. People don't seem to grasp this. This delta variant is not a lie."

In Monmouth County, 64 percent of all adults over 18 are fully vaccinated, according to this CDC graphic. On Tuesday of this week, Gov. Phil Murphy begged all New Jersey residents to get inoculated.

"Since the vaccine roll-out, every patient who died at Riverview has not been vaccinated," said Dr. Amy Eschinger, an infectious disease doctor at Riverview Medical Center, who did not treat Miller. "And we did not see a single vaccinated person in the hospital until the delta variant showed up."

Three patients died with coronavirus at Riverview in June, she said. All had not been vaccinated. There were no deaths in July.

Between Monday and Thursday of this week, there have been 330 new positive cases of COVID-19 in Monmouth County, and one new death, although the death did not occur at Riverview.

When the three vaccines received emergency-use approval last spring, all of their pharmaceutical makers warned that none of them would be 100 percent effective at preventing someone from getting COVID-19. What the vaccines do is prevent serious illness or death caused by the coronavirus.

In fact, the CDC even warned that vaccine breakthrough cases should be expected.

"There will be a small percentage of fully vaccinated people who still get sick, are hospitalized or die from COVID-19," the federal agency wrote in April.

Two shots of Moderna and Pfizer work best, about 95 percent effective at preventing serious illness, according to U.S. News & World Report. The one-shot Johnson & Johnson is 72 percent effective. Just Wednesday, Pfizer talked in its quarterly earnings report about releasing a third booster shot to increase effectiveness against the delta variant that's surging nationwide.

Because the delta variant is much more contagious, the CDC recommended even vaccinated people mask up indoors in areas of high virus spread. And Monmouth County has been identified as an area of "high" transmission — the highest in New Jersey, in fact.

This Middletown woman's story:

Miller got her second shot of Moderna on March 28. Like so many Americans, she has some health issues, but none of them is particularly life-threatening: She has rheumatoid arthritis, lupus that is in remission and a third autoimmune disease, Sjogren's syndrome.

"I don't have diabetes, I'm not obese, and I eat really healthy," she said. "I haven't gotten the flu in more than 15 years. I'm a healthy person."

At the end of June, she and her husband, 66, and their 25-year-old son were extremely excited to drive down to Florida for a long-awaited family reunion. They had rented a vacation home in the Sarasota area, and many relatives — including several older grandparents — stayed with them. Everyone staying in the house was fully vaccinated.

Miller said she still wore masks sometimes but otherwise embraced life beyond the pandemic: She went shopping and out to eat, to packed restaurants where "nobody wore masks." She stopped religiously using hand sanitizer.

The family returned to Port Monmouth on July 5. She started feeling "extremely tired" two days later, July 7.

"On July 8, I went to see my rheumatologist for my monthly visit and told him, 'Doctor, I'm just not feeling right,'" she said. "The next day, I got deathly ill. I started vomiting, getting pains in my chest; my gastrointestinal system got all messed up. I went to an urgent care clinic and got a COVID test. It came back positive."

Miller said doctors there were very pleased when she told them she'd been vaccinated and told her to go home, rest and take Tylenol as needed. They told her it would likely be a mild case.

It was not a mild case. For the next seven days, instead of getting better, she deteriorated: Miller said she was coughing so hard she bruised her rib cage, she was throwing up blood and had other symptoms she doesn't want to publicly divulge.

Finally, on July 14, her husband drove her to the emergency room at Riverview Medical Center in Red Bank. She was admitted immediately with double pneumonia (in both lungs). Tests showed "astronomical viral COVID levels."

At Riverview, Miller was admitted to an isolated room in the cardiac unit, one step below the ICU.

"Oh boy, what I went through. Thank God they never talked about intubating me," she said. "The doctors kept telling me, 'Nancy, you will beat this. You are not critical.' I said, 'This is not critical?' Meanwhile, my doctors kept saying they were confident I would survive this and that's all because of the vaccine."

(Five days after Miller was admitted to Riverview, her husband tested positive for COVID-19. He did not feel well, but it was otherwise a mild case and he recovered at home. However, neither he nor her son was allowed to come visit her in the hospital. Her son never got COVID-19, nor did any of her extended family from the Florida vacation house.)

Miller said she was given hourly injections in her stomach to prevent her blood from clotting (COVID-19 has caused fatal blood clots); medicine to keep her blood pressure down; and antibiotics, the antiviral remdesivir and high dosages of zinc and vitamin C.

"COVID paralyzes your whole body. You lie there just struggling to breathe and move your diaphragm," she said. "At several points, my breathing stopped when I was sleeping and they rushed in. At one point they thought I was having a heart attack."

"Remdesivir almost killed me, but it also saved my life. I think I lived because I would force myself to get up and walk around. I remember looking at myself in the bathroom mirror and saying, 'Nancy, you have to survive this. You have to beat this.'"

Not all tests are precise enough to identify if someone has the delta variant. And Miller said that's what the doctors at Riverview told her.

"They told me we don't test for it as there are so many variants. However, we are 100 percent positive you have the delta variant," she said. "The doctors told me people are going to start dying again because this delta variant is highly contagious. When they released me on July 21, my doctors told me, 'Nancy, go live. You beat this.'"

Now back in her home in Port Monmouth, Miller stills gets very dizzy; she has no taste, no smell, and lingering pain in her chest. On top of all this, when she shares on Facebook that she got a very serious case of COVID-19 despite being vaccinated, she said she is sent "dozens" of hateful messages and comments.

"People tell me the vaccine gave me COVID. I don't even know what to say," she said. "I know I would have died if I had not gotten the vaccine. COVID almost killed me and ruined my body. I 100 percent believe I survived because of the vaccine. Thank God it was strong enough in my system."

Related: Monmouth County Is in 'High' Transmission Zone for Mask Wearing (July 27)

Editor's note: An earlier version of this story stated coronavirus patients in the Riverview Medical Center ICU died while Miller was hospitalized in July. Those patients were in the ICU in June, not July. Patch regrets the error.

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