‘I’m alive’: Carol Stream man recalls near-fatal battle with COVID

As Carol Stream resident Chuck Drungelo laid in a hospital bed in April 2020, hooked up to machines that were keeping him alive, his prognosis was dire.

COVID-19 had sickened everyone in Drungelo’s household but hit him the worst, leaving him with multiple organ system failures, including his lungs.

One critical care specialist at Northwestern Medicine Central DuPage Hospital in Winfield said Drungelo’s odds of survival likely were less than 10%.

But survive he did — as did his wife, Diane; their adult son, Jordan; and his mother-in-law, Barbara Elkins. Elkins died in 2022 from unrelated issues.

“It almost doesn’t seem real,” the now-59-year-old Drungelo said of the life-threatening experience. “Did I really go through that?”

The four members of the Drungelo family contracted COVID-19 in quick succession just as the pandemic was starting to ravage the U.S. At one point, Chuck, Diane and Jordan were in Central DuPage Hospital’s intensive care ward simultaneously.

Drungelo’s asthma made him more vulnerable to severe complications. His lungs became inflamed with infection and his case became the most critical in the hospital.

When traditional treatments proved unsuccessful, doctors tried a form of artificial life support called extracorporeal membrane oxygenation, or ECMO. They connected him to a heart-lung bypass machine that funneled his blood out of his body, removed the carbon dioxide, enriched it with oxygen, warmed it and then pumped it back into him.

The ECMO treatments took 19 days. Drungelo was heavily sedated and medically paralyzed to keep him from moving.

“I had so many dreams,” he recalled. “Some of them were hard to put together — what was real, what was a dream.”

The treatments worked. Drungelo’s lungs healed.

Diane Drungelo remembers the frustration and uncertainty she felt as her husband and his medical team waged a battle for his life.

“The doctors knew so little about COVID at that time. They just couldn’t answer the questions I had,” she said. “Would he live to come home? Could we get it again? Will he live a normal life?”

Once Chuck Drungelo recovered enough to leave the ICU at Central DuPage Hospital, he was weaned off a ventilator at RML Specialty Hospital in Hinsdale. From there he went to Northwestern Medicine Marianjoy Rehabilitation Hospital in Wheaton for physical and occupational therapy before being released that July — more than two months after contracting the virus.

“When Chuck finally came home … we were surrounded by ICU nurses from CDH who, at that time, were not seeing many people survive,” Diane Drungelo said. “Many nurses had taken care of all three of us at different times.”

Drungelo returned to his job as a supervisor at a South Elgin plastics company in fall 2020.

“I pushed to go back,” he said. “I wanted to try to get back to as normal a life as possible.”

The effects of COVID-19 linger, however. Drungelo processes and remembers information differently now, for example, and he has food sensitivities that didn’t exist before he got sick.

Drungelo also struggled with survivor’s guilt, wondering why he lived while many others — especially children — didn’t. He said he worked with a therapist to overcome those feelings.

But overall, Drungelo said he feels OK.

“I’m alive,” he said.