After five days, the worst of the COVID-19 symptoms — the headache, the fever, the body ache — had ended. But it was only the start of the medical crisis for Troy L. Randle, a New Jersey cardiologist who is recovering from a devastating coronavirus consequence that doctors are only now learning about.

In mid-April, shortly after he was declared safe to go back to work treating patients in the Virtua Health System, Randle’s headache returned, more vicious than the last time.

“It felt like a sharp pain in the back of my head, and then I felt this intense pressure in the front,” the Mullica Hill man said. “It felt like a vise.”

Randle, 49, tried to wait it out at home. But after days of relentless pain, his wife, Melody, a nurse practitioner, broke into tears begging him to go to the hospital, where he had a CT scan and an MRI.

“I was totally blown away when they said I had a stroke,” Randle said.

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