Pioneer PINE CITY
THURSDAY, APRIL 11 , 2019
VOL. 134 NO. 15 www.pinecitymn.com $1.00
SPORTS PREVIEW: Dragon track, golf, baseball, softball and tennis start spring season. P5
Flu puts Pine City man in a fight for his life BY MIKE GAINOR EDITOR@PINECITYMN.COM
A Pine City man went from sick to desperately ill within the space of a few days this winter. He then spent three weeks in a coma as doctors fought to save him, as his family wondered if he would ever return home. And the disease that caused all this? The flu. Just the flu. ‘A LITTLE BIT FEVERISH’ Nick Fulweiler commutes from home in Pine City to work as a machinist in Coon Rapids. At the end of January, he started not feeling well. “He felt like he was getting a cold,” explained his wife, Tori Fulweiler. “A little bit feverish, on and off. Hot, cold. A little bit of a cough.” Nick did not receive a flu shot this year, Tori said. So when they went to the urgent care they weren’t surprised when he was diagnosed with possible influenza and bronchitis, and sent home with medication. They both thought: it’s the flu. He’ll be sick for a while, then get better. But the next day, at home, Nick collapsed. He was passed out with his eyes open and his skin going gray. “It was like someone was showering him with sweat,” Tori said. “It was pouring out of his entire body.” Their 14-year-old son called an ambulance, which brought Nick to the Fairview Lakes Medical Center in Wyoming. Nick was already unconscious. The doctors told Tori he had pneumonia. But Nick continued to decline. On Feb. 2, he was taken to intensive care and put on a respirator because he was drowning from the fluid in his lungs. That evening they transferred Nick to the Hennepin County Medical Center in Minneapolis. Nick tested positive for Influenza A. Doctors explained to Tori that Nick had developed severe pneumonia as a result of the flu, which then led to severe acute
Hwy. 70 bridge shuts down on Monday, April 15 STAFF REPORT NEWS@PINECITYMN.COM
Motorists traveling on Interstate 35 will encounter lane closures as crews work to demolish the Highway 70 Bridge over I-35 in Pine County, beginning Monday, April 15. I-35 will be reduced to one lane in each direction from Monday, April 15 through Thursday, April 18. Northbound and southbound traffic will be detoured onto the Highway 70 ramps during bridge demolition. Highway 70 traffic will be detoured to Highway 7 in Pine City beginning April 15 through mid-July. On the east side of I-35, traffic will be routed north on Highway 61 into Pine City, then west on Hillside Avenue back to I-35. On the west side of I-35, traffic will be routed north on County Road 23 (Fairview Avenue) to Pokegama Lake Road, then east back to I-35. The County Road 7 (Hillside Ave./Pokegama Lake Road) bridge over I-35 will be shut down starting in July and ending in October.
PHOTO PROVIDED
Nick Fulweiler spent weeks in a medically-induced coma while a machine oxygenated his blood - all as a result of complications from Influenza A.
respiratory distress syndrome and sepsis – a condition where the immune system begins to turn against itself. Nick was put into a medically-induced coma, placed on a respirator and an Extracorporeal Membrane Oxygenation (ECMO) machine, which pumps a patient’s blood outside the body and gets the oxygen into their blood that their lungs cannot. “They put two tubes into his
neck,” Tori said. “It ran around his head. It took the blood all out of his body, oxygenated the blood and put it back in. And part of that process was so that his lungs didn’t have to do one single thing.” Tori noted that before he started the ECMO machine, Nick was running fevers up to 104 degrees and had to be icepacked to get the fevers down. After they started SEE FLU, PAGE 18
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