FORT WORTH, Texas — More and more people are discovering how bad the lingering effects of COVID-19 can be, including one North Texan whose possible COVID side effects were nearly deadly.

Keegan Vargas’s 2021 started out in a very tough spot. His entire family came down with COVID. Though his own case was mild, his father was hit much more severely and eventually died from the virus in February. Vargas didn’t think the illness could take much more from his household, but he’d learn otherwise five months after kicking the virus.

“About five months later [in July] I take off work and I had trouble breathing,” said Vargas.

The Fort Worth man has been asthmatic for several years, but said he hadn’t had an incident bad enough to send him to the hospital in quite some time. Following COVID, he noticed some lingering breathing issues all the way up to that day in July when he told his mom he thought he was having an asthma attack and needed medical attention right away.

“The ambulance came and that was the last thing I remember,” said Vargas.

Vargas said he doesn’t remember much and his family said he was rushed to Texas Health Southwest, then later to Texas Health Fort Worth for emergency help. Texas Health leaders say Vargas was in such bad shape that he couldn’t move, speak, and even had to be induced into a coma for seven days.

“It was so severe that he was on the ventilator but we were having a tough time ventilating his lungs,” said Dr. Johnathan Besas, D.O., pulmonologist at Texas Health Forth Worth.

Dr. Besas eventually had to use a therapy called extracorporeal membrane oxygenation (ECMO) to save Vargas. It is essentially a machine that pumps blood out of the body and through an artificial lung in order to breathe for the patient while their lungs are healed. He said it worked for Vargas and got him on the road to recovery.

The asthma attack sent Vargas to the hospital, but doctors believe it was the lingering damage from his previous COVID-19 bout that fueled that attack and made it exponentially worse.

“It seems like it’s related as in he had COVID and then afterwords just had a lot of difficulty in dealing with his asthma,” said Dr. Besas.

Long-term side effects of COVID-19 are known as long COVID or post COVID, and Vargas isn’t the first person to deal with such issues.

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s website, symptoms and complications of long COVID include things like breathing problems, heart issues, pains in the body, mood changes, tiredness, brain fog, and sleep problems, among many others. One of the more prevalent issues coming up from long COVID seems to be changes in patients’ sense of smell and taste that can go as far as food and water tasting terrible for months after a COVID-19 infection.

Dr. Besas said he anticipates more lingering effects of COVID will continue to show up as the illness is still relatively new and such effects are still being discovered. Besas said, at this point, the best advice he can give to avoid those long-term effects is to do everything possible to avoid a COVID-19 infection in the first place, including getting vaccinated and regular hand washing.

Vargas is now five months beyond his near-fatal asthma attack and is back home and back on his feet. He is using a nebulizer at night to avoid further breathing complications.

“Surreal,” said Vargas looking back at the year he and his family have had. “Like, I just couldn’t believe it happened.”

COVID-19 took a lot from his family over the last 12 months, but he said after the bullet he dodged, he has a lot to be thankful for.