When Donald Strunk wanted to express his gratitude to the staff of the Sebastian River Medical Center for saving his life a year ago, it was only natural that his “thank-you” gesture would have something to do with food – after all, Strunk is the retired general manager of the famous Commander’s Palace restaurant in New Orleans.
So, on the first anniversary of Strunk’s arrival by ambulance at the Sebastian hospital, last July 11, Strunk and his wife Cyndy, who still works remotely for Tulane University in New Orleans, brought lunch for about a dozen people from the Intensive Care Unit involved in the treatment that brought him back from the brink of death in a nasty bout with legionnaires disease.
Strunk may not have had access anymore to the fine dining offered at his former New Orleans eatery, but the tray of deli sandwiches, fresh fruit and sweets was much appreciated by the medical staff.
Strunk’s wife explained that they knew a lot of bad news had been swirling around the hospital recently because of the bankruptcy of its parent company, Steward Health Systems, which is trying to sell all of its 31 hospitals in bankruptcy court auctions, so they wanted to do something nice for the staff.
“I’ll be forever thankful for what they did for me,” Strunk said. “I’ll do anything I can to help them through their struggles. They’re a small but mighty team there at the ICU. I know they don’t quit. Bringing lunch was just a small thing. We wanted to recognize them in some way.
Who knows what’ll happen to the hospital, but if the same people are still around here next year, we’ll bring them lunch again in 2025 on the second anniversary of my going there.”
Cyndy said she knew they wouldn’t just be able to walk into the Intensive Care Unit off the street with the lunch trays, so she had called ahead to one of the nurses to let them know they were coming.
“They had a whole welcoming committee waiting for us,” she said. “I was overwhelmed.
Even the security guard at the main entrance remembered us. And the nurse was there who held my hand and dried my tears while I was sitting at my husband’s bedside for 37 days through the ups and downs. It was a very moving experience for me.”
Strunk retired from his stressful restaurant management job in February 2020, just before the Covid pandemic wreaked havoc with the restaurant industry. He and his wife settled “a stone’s throw from” the Sebastian hospital by the Indian River Lagoon.
About year ago, one day in July, Strunk started feeling unwell and running a fever, but a Covid test was negative. At an urgent care clinic, they gave him some anti-nausea medication but sent him back home. In the afternoon, he started “breathing funny and showing signs of cognitive decline,” Mrs. Strunk recalls. “When I came back from running a brief 15-minute errand for a neighbor, he had fallen to the floor and was unable to get up.”
She called an ambulance, but at first he said, “being a stubborn man,” he refused to be taken to the hospital. He was finally convinced to let them take him when an ambulance crewmember told him: “Sir, if we don’t get you to the hospital, you’re going to lie here and die.”
At the Sebastian hospital emergency room, they managed to stabilize him enough to send him on to the ICU where he was sedated and put on a ventilator. The first 36 hours looked bleak as all kinds of specialists tried to figure out what was wrong with him. One of the doctors said Strunk was “one of the sickest guys he’d ever seen,” Cyndy Strunk said.
An infectious disease specialist finally solved the mystery: It was Legionnaires’ disease. The Strunks and his various doctors still have no idea how and where he contracted the ailment.
He had been at an Orlando hotel not long before becoming ill, but it was curious that there were no other reported cases there.
“In the end, the bacteria that cause Legionnaires’ disease are present in the environment, so we may never know,” said Strunk.
The doctors at the Sebastian hospital eventually found the right antibiotic for what was ailing Strunk and were able to transfer him from the hospital’s ICU to a rehab facility to get his strength back after the ordeal. After 37 days in the hospital, he had lost a lot of muscle mass.
He was released from rehab last August and weaned off all medications by October. After six months he felt he got about 80 percent of his strength back and he feels he’s up to about 90 percent now. “I think I’m pretty much fit as fiddle,” says Strunk, now 66. “I’m riding my bike and I’m swimming just about every day.”
Cyndy says she knows they owe her husband’s life to the Sebastian hospital and they will be forever grateful. “Were it not for every person in that hospital, he would not have made it,” she says. “The doctors and the nurses watched over him all day, every day. They were there even when they didn’t need to be. I know some doctors came in on their days off just to check up on him to make sure he was still hanging in there.”