Spotsylvania father, coach, 42, recovering from COVID-19 damage to heart, lungs

Oh, how Lindsey Cashin wishes they were right— the people who say that COVID-19 is nothing more than a bad cold.

If that had been the case, her husband Frank, a healthy and athletic 42-year-old who coached four baseball and soccer teams last fall, wouldn’t have developed COVID-induced inflammation. He woke up in the middle of the night for two weeks in December, screaming because he said his joints felt “like someone had a screwdriver in there.”

His scarred lungs lost 30 percent of their capacity, and he developed an accelerated heart rate, caused by his heart trying to compensate for the impact on his lungs. The couple’s four sons, ages 9 to 16, watched him struggle just to climb stairs or say a few words.

“Talking to him in the hospital was … like … this … ,” Lindsey said, gasping between words for effect. “I really wish all he had was a cold because this has flipped our lives upside down for the last three months.”

“It’s been really scary,” said Frank. “I was essentially a fifth kid, an infant that she has had to deal with.”

In early December, the omicron variant struck the Spotsylvania County household, infecting all six members. The mother, an assistant principal at Dixon–Smith Middle School in Stafford County, thought she would have had the worst outcome, given she has “health issues out the wazoo.” Or the boys, given they usually get whatever colds and strep throat are making the rounds.

The parents were especially concerned about 14-year-old Cohen, an asthmatic who needed breathing treatments during his early years and has had pneumonia four times.

Instead, the healthiest person in the family—the father—is the one whose lungs were infected with COVID. He went from not having a primary care doctor, because he never needed to see one as an adult, to having specialists treat his impaired organs.

“It just doesn’t make any sense,” Lindsey said.

During the two years that COVID-19 has become a household name, its randomness remains one of its mysteries. While older people and those with underlying health issues have been vulnerable from the start, the infection also has hit people with seemingly no health problems.

“We’ve had very young, healthy individuals have serious disease and even pass away from COVID,” Dr. Mike McDermott, the CEO of Mary Washington Health Care, said last month. “You’re taking a dice roll as to what your course will be when you catch COVID-19.”

Virginia saw its first COVID-19 cases two years ago this month, then had a major surge in infections in late fall 2020. Afterward, officials at Spotsylvania Regional Medical Center started “to see this group of patients who didn’t recover,” said Karen Drilling, director of the hospital’s rehab services and wound care. “They continued to have persistent symptoms.”

She and her colleagues researched…