A man who was called a COVID-19 “patient zero” is hitting the very ski slopes where he got the disease, and dishing out some words of wisdom.
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On March 6, 2020, Gregg Garfield was hospitalized after contracting COVID-19. At the time, it was a little-understood respiratory disease. Garfield was on a skiing trip with 12 friends in Italy.
“We were getting sick,” he told PEOPLE. “We kept taking Advil and would feel a little better, but it just got progressively worse.”
It got to a point, however, that Garfield had to get flown back to Los Angeles for hospitalization. That’s when he became known as “patient zero.”
He spent 64 days fighting for survival, where he suffered multiple organ failures, sepsis, and several collapsed lungs. Doctors had to amputate portions of eight fingers and three toes to keep him alive.
However, after six years, Gregg Garfield is hitting the slopes where it all began for him.
“It’s been a dream of mine to get back there,” he said. He is traveling to Val Gardena in northern Italy’s Dolomite Mountains with his fiancée and two daughters. “I’m heading back to where everything changed.”
“And we’re going to enjoy every minute of every day while we’re there.”
COVID Patient Zero Wonders Why He Survived His Shocking Ordeal
With so many dying from COVID-19, Gregg Garfield often wonders why he survived at all.
“It almost feels like it’s somebody else’s story — except when I look down at my hands,” he shared. “To this day I still have no idea why I recovered. I’ve had no long-haul effects and no scarring on my lungs, despite them collapsing four different times.”
“People expect me to say that it ruined my life. It didn’t. It changed my life for the better.”
“The only ‘why me?’ question I ask myself isn’t, ‘Why did I go through this?’ The real question is: ‘Why did I survive?’” he explained. “And the answer is so that I can share the story of my good fortune with others and remind people that you don’t have to die [to understand what’s important in life].”
“You just have to be appreciative of every day you have”