Ex-Michigan football's Mark Campbell is coronavirus cautionary tale: 'It kicked my ass'

He was sick and achy, barely eating, and self-isolating in the basement of his suburban Detroit home.

When former Michigan star Mark Campbell, a tight end on the Wolverines’ 1997 national championship team who went on to play 10 seasons in the NFL, started having trouble breathing, he shuffled to the back seat of his car. His wife, Michell, made the panicked 10-minute drive to Crittenton Hospital.

In the waiting area of the emergency room, Campbell was greeted by a single nurse in full personal protective equipment who asked him a series of yes or no questions. He answered yes to almost every one: Do you have a temperature? Do you have shortness of breath? Do you have a headache?

Both his wife and the nurse stood 6 feet away.

After the nurse took his vitals, he walked slowly through the door toward Room 1 of the emergency ward. Campbell looked back at Michell and called out her name.

“She turned around and she was obviously upset and I remember telling her just that I loved her,” he said. “And for the first time in my life, I remember thinking to myself, ‘Am I going to see her again?’ Now that may sound super dramatic, and I don’t want it to sound super dramatic, but that’s how I felt at the time.

“I kind of get emotional just thinking about it now, not because I feel like, oh, at the time I was threatened. Just because there’s those moments in your life that I’ll never forget that feeling. At the time, it was a hopeless feeling. I didn’t go there with hope, excited to check in. I went there, I knew I was not in good shape.”

Campbell,  the CEO of Medkinect, a medical supply company he started in 2009, is one of more than 17,000 people statewide who have tested positive for COVID-19.

He spent five days in the hospital after nearly two weeks in self-isolation, and is back home for a second stint of self-quarantine. He said he never felt like he was on death’s doorstep, but he’s sharing his story to help others realize how serious and frightening the coronavirus pandemic is.

“I played 10 years in the NFL, pretty tough, was thinking basically I’m going to grind all this out,” he said. “It (bleeping) kicked my ass.”

Where did he get it?

Campbell doesn’t have any idea how he contracted the virus, though he thinks it could have been from pumping gas. 

His odyssey started March 15, after he, his wife and their three kids, ages 9 to 14, rented a condo in Gaylord for a weekend ski trip at Otsego Resort.

Campbell had just implemented a work-from-home program at Medkinect’s Royal Oak office, and he figured the trip was a final getaway, with Michigan headed for a statewide stay-home order.

“We went there skiing and there was nobody there,” he said. “And that was our whole thought process, social distancing. If we’re skiing, we’re really not going to be around people.”

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On the way home, when he stopped to get gas, Campbell wondered if he should pull the sleeve of his jacket over his hand before he grabbed the pump handle. He didn’t, and didn’t think much about it again until a few days later, when he tried to retrace his steps and figure out how he got sick.

The following day, Campbell still felt “totally fine” and had all of his energy, though he started running “a little hot” by the end of the day.

He went to the office again the next day, but wasn’t feeling like himself and came home around noon. A few hours later, after doing some light work around the house, he took a shower, then took his temperature. When it registered 102.6, he called his sister, a certified registered nurse anesthetist, who suggested he go to one of the new coronavirus drive-through testing sites at Troy Beaumont Hospital.

When Campbell arrived, he found something that looked like “a scene out of 'Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome.' ”

It was late at night, there weren't many cars, but police lights were flashing and three or four people were standing in the parking lot in protective gear. 

“It was a little bit scary," he said.

Medical personnel on site took his vitals and asked a series of questions about his health. He hadn't been around anyone who had traveled recently — or really, anyone but his family. They told him he likely had COVID-19, but with no underlying medical conditions and no family history of heart trouble, he didn’t qualify for a test. The only thing to do was go home and self-isolate.

For the next 11 days, that’s what Campbell did.

He locked himself in the basement, with his wife and kids upstairs, and spent most of his time sleeping. Michell would leave food at the top of the stairs, but he didn’t have much of an appetite — some days he ate nothing but a few eggs and toast in the morning.

He talked to his kids through the basement door, heard the pitter-patter of their feet above, and crushed Tylenol to try to control his fever, which never dipped below 101 degrees.

“It was very, very surreal. Very surreal,” Campbell said. “And I know (the kids) would get very concerned because they don’t know. They’re kids. They’re 14, 11 and 9. So they don’t know what the heck’s going on with Dad.

"Meanwhile, every time I can kind of see them at the bottom of the steps or whatever, what they would do is open the door and literally talk to me just to tell me that they love me or whatever, and have short little conversations. That was the best we could do.”

On Day 3 of his self-isolation, three spoonfuls into a bowl of Froot Loops, Campbell lost his sense of taste.

“Everything kind of tasted like cardboard, no matter what I was eating,” he said, with the exception of foods such as citrus, apples and orange juice.

About five days into his self-isolation, he started to get the dry cough associated with COVID-19. On Day 12, as he sat in his recliner watching “Peaky Blinders,” he suddenly was struggling to breathe.

“It wasn’t wheezing,” Campbell said. “It’s like I could breathe, kind of in these short quick breaths, but I could never get satisfied with the oxygen. So I couldn’t have these big, deep breaths. If I did that, I would start coughing and it would get worse. So I couldn’t expand my lungs.

"I was just kind of panting, almost like a dog after a long walk or something. That’s what it felt like. And I was trying to just get as deep of breaths as I could, but I was laboring.”

No tubes in front of kids

Once they were in the car, Campbell focused on breathing; Michell tried her best to stay calm as she drove.

At the hospital, doctors hooked him up to an oxygen mask and took his temperature: 103.1. An Oakland County health official later told him it was the highest he heard of anyone having at the time they were admitted.

They ran a coronavirus test, the results of which wouldn't be back for three to five days.

His oxygen level was 86%, so he was brought up to Crittenton’s fifth-floor coronavirus ward, where he stayed in virtual isolation waiting for his oxygen level to reach the 94% to 96% threshold doctors said he needed before being released.

Doctors and nurses checked Campbell’s vitals every three to four hours; on his second day, they came every morning to give him two pills of Plaquenil (generic name hydroxychloroquine), the anti-malarial drug that has been used to treat COVID-19, with mixed results.

Not once during his five days at Crittenton did he see another coronavirus patient, even though the floor was full of others suffering from the disease. That isolation, coupled with the uncertainty medical professionals had about the disease and its treatments, had him feeling uneasy even as he started to recover.

“I would tell you this, I’ve never felt so supported and loved but yet lonely,” Campbell said. “Because I’m by myself. The weird part, and I received a lot of calls, a lot of phone calls from family and friends, which was awesome. But ironically, I didn’t have the energy to really communicate with them.”

Campbell figures he slept 12 hours a day, often drifting in and out in the middle of movies. The first two days, he talked to his wife and kids once or twice a day by phone, so the children didn’t have to see him with an oxygen mask on and tubes in his nose. He FaceTimed with them morning and night (with his mask off) the final three days of his stay.

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When he wasn't thinking about family, he lay in his hospital bed thinking about his will and trust and reviewing his finances in his head. 

“What do you do when you’re by yourself all the time? You overthink,” Campbell said. “I already don’t have a lot of energy, but I knew, that’s the next thought. I got to make sure that my family’s OK.”

He started feeling better within 24 hours of his first dose of Plaquenil. He tried to wean himself off the oxygen, first taking his mask off for a few minutes at a time, then for longer stretches, in hopes of building his lungs back up.

On Wednesday — hours after the test results confirmed he was positive for COVID-19, Campbell was released from the hospital, though doctors told him it was probably best to continue self-isolating for another two weeks.

He's fever-free now and estimates he’s back to about 85% of his pre-COVID health. He still doesn’t have much of an appetite, he wears a mask and gloves whenever he ventures out of the basement, and he jokes that one good thing to come out of the past few weeks is that he has lost 17 pounds.

At 6-foot-5 and 267 pounds (pre-coronavirus), Campbell is essentially the same size he was during his playing days with the Cleveland Browns, Buffalo Bills and New Orleans Saints. He works out five times a week, stays active coaching football, and took what he thought were the necessary steps to avoid infection.

That's why his tale is for those who think the disease won’t have an impact on them.

Campbell's wife and children are healthy, as are all of his employees at Medkinect, and for that he’s thankful. He can't imagine how his kids would be if Michell got sick.

Having survived COVID-19 has given him new perspective on what's important, and he wonders now if it will change the way people go about their lives.

“The way I look at it, too, especially with the isolation or quarantine, look, it sucks,” Campbell said. “There’s no other way to tell you that when you’re sitting in a basement by yourself. With all that being said, man, I feel blessed and healthy right now. And it’s a small price to pay for the whole bigger picture.”

Contact Dave Birkett at dbirkett@freepress.com. Follow him on Twitter @davebirkett. Read more on the Detroit Lions and sign up for our Lions newsletter.