Rep. Mike Kelly, a Republican from Pennsylvania, said there is no one-size-fits-all way to treat the coronavirus. He said the key is to have faith in doctors and the options that they lay out for you.
“I took Z-Pak, which most people use, and hydroxychloroquine … so, maybe that reduced the effects on me,” he said from his home in Butler, Pennsylvania. “I had a long talk with my doctors about it. It was their suggestion, but, ultimately, it was my decision. There is always some caveats with taking any drug, but I understood that and decided for me it was the right choice.”
On Monday, President Trump said he began taking the anti-malarial drug hydroxychloroquine along with zinc after consulting with the White House doctor.
Kelly said he was first diagnosed with the coronavirus on March 27 after doing a drive-through test at Butler Memorial Hospital. He spent a good week down with various symptoms, then spent a month in isolation.
Since his recovery, Kelly told the Washington Examiner he tested negative for the virus and positive for antibodies last week at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center Falk clinic, then donated convalescent plasma at a suburban blood bank.
“It’s really interesting. I didn’t know they could do these things. I really didn’t,” he said. “A friend of mine, who I graduated from Butler with, is a doctor out towards Philadelphia, and he was texting me when he found out I got sick. He says, ‘You know what? When you’re over this, you ought to consider donating your plasma.’ I said, ‘What do you mean, donating my plasma? How am I supposed to do that?’ And he goes, ‘Well, I think UPMC has a program. I’m reading about it right now, but I think you’d be a good candidate once you’re over this and you’re corona-free.’ So, I asked the doctors here in Butler about it, and they said yes.”
Kelly said donating the plasma was very easy to do: “Totally painless. Very safe. You’re very secure. You have no danger of getting other infections. I think that’s one of the hard things that the blood bank was confronted with, is people who were afraid to give blood because they think they may pick up some type of a virus.”
“I am trying to tamp down that high anxiety that exists right now,” Kelly said of the hesitancy people have had in donating to blood banks. Blood banks across the state have been urging people to donate to avoid critical shortages amid coronavirus closures.
Kelly said some of his symptoms included a lack of appetite and an overwhelming feeling of fatigue and exhaustion. “All you’re doing is, you’re supposed to hydrate. So, I was drinking as much water as I could, and I wasn’t eating, so a combination of those two things. It was really a strange time. I mean, I’ve had the flu before. This was really bad. For me, there’s nothing like it. It was really a bad case of the flu. I had muscle spasms across my back to my hand. I was exhausted most of the time. I had no appetite. Just exhausted. I mean, really, really tired. I was probably sleeping a good 16, 18 hours a day.”
Kelly, a Republican, has been in Congress since 2011 and represents Pennsylvania’s 16th Congressional District, which stretches from Erie down to Pittsburgh’s northern suburbs, including his hometown of Butler. He said he was planning to return to the blood bank to give plasma again this week.
