This is the story about my husband Jeff, the love and my life and father to my 3 children. We were married for almost 25 years.

Jeff and I got Covid in early July 2021. He went and got tested at a Kroger Little Clinic and was told to just go home and drink lots of fluids. We both had high fevers, nausea, awful headaches and body aches for around 5 days before my daughter decided to take Jeff to the hospital because he was struggling to breathe. He never complained, so we had no idea how bad he was getting. I hugged and kissed him goodbye telling him I loved him. I wasn’t too worried as I figured he would just go get some oxygen and be home in a few days. They would not let my daughter stay and go back with him so as soon as they took him back she left. This is something she still struggles with today. The fact that she dropped her dad off there. A place we thought was going to help him and care for him in the best way possible. We were sadly mistaken. Thus begins the 72 day nightmare he endured. From the beginning it was hard to know what was going on or what they were giving him. I never gave consent for things , nor did my husband say they ever asked him, they just automatically did stuff. With the oxygen he was on he was in no condition to communicate and no one was allowed to be there to advocate for him. He frequently texted about no one coming in to check on him or help him. He would push the nurse button and it would sometimes take hours for someone to come. He sent me pictures of things like his urinal being completely full and not having anywhere else to pee. They gave him a catheter when he complained. He said it hurt and burned so bad. He didn’t understand why it was necessary when he was peeing fine. They tried their remdesivir and plasma which of course did not work. There was no discussion about either of those but they were just automatically given as part of the protocol. Shortly after this thins quickly started going downhill for my husband and they wanted to vent him on July 23rd. The nurse on duty actually urged him not to do it as she had not seen any patient in that hospital survive the ventilator. Not one. So, my husband refused, and this made the doctor very angry. He said my husband’s oxygen mask was not to come off for any reason. Strict order for no food and no water. This lasted at least 4-5 days. My husband was so thirsty. They refused to give him ice chips, swaps or anything. A few nice nurses at night would feel bad for him and sneak him a sip of water against doctor’s orders.

After he somehow fought through that torture, he started improving. His oxygen needs declined, and he was starting to sit up and able to eat and drink. He was so excited to have coffee for a few days. We were so excited he had made a turn for the better. My kids and I were busy making posters that said “We Love You” and “Get Well Soon”. We were going to go the next day and hold them up outside his window so he could see them. He never got to see us or his signs. That day a nurse left him sitting up in a chair for over half the day. He kept calling for someone to come help him back into the bed, but no one ever came. This proved to be too much too fast for him and he quickly declined again after that day. His oxygen needs kept going up and he kept being told there was nothing else they could do and if he would have got the vaccine he wouldn’t be in the position he was in. We were begging for Ivermectin, Vitamin C therapy, anything. We were always told it wasn’t part of the Covid protocol. I also begged to get in to be with him. But I was told it wasn’t safe for me. Even though I had Covid at the same time and was recovered.

Late on July 31 Jeff texted me that they wanted to vent him. I was so confused because he just typed 9 year old daughter goodnight a few hours earlier and everything seemed ok. But supposedly when they flipped him over his breathing could not recover. He was refusing the vent, but he told me he could not breathe and was scared. I demanded to see him. The doctor knew we were reluctant and I said we weren’t doing it unless I could see him, so the doctor surprisingly let me go in to see Jeff. When I arrived the doctor reiterated his belief that Jeff would not be in this position if he had just gotten the vaccine. My husband was laying there struggling to breathe and the doctor is trying to debate with me on why we didn’t get the shot. He then mocked our faith by saying “You can wait and see if your god will save him tonight and maybe he will and maybe he won’t”. He went on to say Jeff would be left with severe organ damage if they didn’t vent now and that it would be just for a short 5 days or so. Just long enough to let his lungs rest. I asked for 5 minutes alone with my husband and the doctor agreed and left the room. I tried to talk Jeff out of it, but he told me he thought it was his only chance to survive and he wanted to do it. He could barely talk or look at me. He seemed to be going in and out of consciousness. It was heartbreaking. I didn’t know what else to do. It was the middle of the night. I had no one with me and no one to help. So, I relented. I kissed him and told him how much we loved him and that he needed to not give up but to fight and believe that he was going to make it. They made me leave and I left sobbing, thinking that may be the last time I saw my husband.

The next day they had his ventilator set at 50% oxygen. Later that night right before attending a candlelight vigil I organized outside the hospital, I logged into his chart to find out he extubated and turned cyanotic. I actually had to look up what that word meant. Basically, he coded, turned blue and they had to bag him. No one called to tell me this happened. I only found out from his chart. When I did call in a panic they told me his oxygen was now at 100%, he had a spiked fever and numerous infections from aspirating the contents from his feeding tube. Unable to be with him I sat in the waiting room crying all night until he was stable.  I would later learn from a nurse there that night that his sedation had run dry and he woke up and pulled out his tube.

Jeff somehow fought through that horror and was once again making positive progress getting back to 50% oxygen needs. At one point they tried to do a breathing trial and he supposedly failed. A few days later they tried another and he passed! I was so excited about this. But that was short lived because they said he got too agitated after the breathing trial so they weren’t going to try again. They threw him back on heavy sedation and never tried again. It was apparent at that moment they were not going to try to get him off the ventilator. They would tell Jeff kept trying to breathe over the vent and how bad that was. I thought it was a good thing that showed how strong he still was but they said he needed to stay in synch with the vent and let it do all the work. I kept asking for Jeff to be transferred but they would always say no he was too critical. I had a hospital in Texas willing to take him and evaluate him for a lung transplant, but his doctor would not agree and said lung transplants would only give him another 5 years or so. I tried to say 5 years is better than no time but they would not listen. At one point Jeff needed an emergency bronchoscopy. He was bleeding from his mouth but they weren’t sure why/where it was coming from. They were afraid it was coming from his lungs or something. Turns out it was  from the nurse cleaning his mouth. She apparently jabbed the roof of his mouth so badly it caused a big gash. He bled for weeks after that. His breathing tube and mouth would always be caked in dried blood when I would go in. So, not only did he have bloody, raw wrists from the restraints, he was also bleeding from his mouth and had bed sores. Throughout this nightmare there was 1 nurse, yes one, who actually tried to help Jeff. She would try to convince the doctors to do things differently. She got them to go up to 1000mg of Vitamin C instead of 500. She would work on turning his oxygen down. She also continually tried to lower Jeff’s sedation meds and wake him up. It angered her that they had him so knocked out on such high amounts of sedatives. During the days she was there he could hear us and would respond with his eyes or head. He cried one day when he heard my 20 year old daughter’s voice. He was trying to tell me something one day but I could not understand what he was saying. I wish I could know what it was. Anyways, when that nurse would leave it would be back to heavy sedation and oxygen going in the wrong direction. No one else wanted to try and work with him. It’s like they were all robots going through motions of what their leaders were telling them. All with the same outcomes on that floor. Code blues and death.

Jeff kept getting infection after infection which started affecting his oxygen. I began to try and search options since they weren’t trying to get him off the vent, wouldn’t give him anything we requested and wouldn’t let him be transferred. I read about these lawyers in NJ who were successfully at getting Ivermectin administered in hospitals. Prior to this we were mocked and laughed at for wanting Ivermectin. We were told to go see a veterinarian for that. We also begged for Vitamin C therapy, Vitamin D, Zinc, Metheprednisone, (which one doc agreed but another took it away)….but it was all denied because it wasn’t part of the covid protocol. During those days I would open the curtain to shine the sun on my husband’s face to try to get him a little vitamin D. I would also try to rub oils and vitamins into his feet. I felt helpless.

I was surprised a judge granted the use of ivermectin so quickly, so I was excited to have hope. The night before the ivermectin was to start, some creepy doctor I had never seen before came into my husband’s room. He tried to tell me how much they cared about Jeff and wanted to help him. He offered to transfer him that night. (It was already the end of the day). I refused since the ivermectin was to start the next day and I knew this was the only reason they were offering. If I moved him now I would have to file and pay all over again at a different hospital. This decision will haunt me forever, but from what I know now, another hospital probably would not have been any different. Before they started the ivermectin the pharmacist at the hospital came to go over all the risks associated with the drug and made me sign some paper. I was so confused as they did not do this with any of the other deadly and harmful drugs they gave Jeff such as Remdesivir, Dexamethasone, Propofol, Dilaudid, etc. Not once did they ask for permission or have me sign anything or go over the risks of those medications. They started the ivermectin the next day and after a few days Jeff started to improve and his numbers looked a lot better. Things were going ok until the hospital started to fight the order for ivermectin (probably because he WAS getting better). The lawyers said I had to decide whether to keep fighting and go to court or just stop the ivermectin. I decided to keep fighting. Little did I know I would be vilified in the media and be the top story on all the news outlets. Reporters came to my home, called my daughter at college, spewed misinformation and false quotes about me etc. It was a nightmare. I never had social media or anything before all of this and now my family and pictures of my husband were all over the news. I read a few of the nasty comments and then had to stop. I was genuinely surprised at the evilness of people. Anyways, I ended up losing in court after a different judge ruled in favor of the hospital and they stopped the ivermectin.

Jeff kept fighting and I think they started to realize he was not going to give up so they decided to do a tracheostomy so they could get him out of there. I did not want to have him trached, but they told me it was the only way they would release him to another care center. Since I thought it was the only way to get him out I agreed. He was headed toward a place that had an 85% success rate of weaning people off ventilators, so I was excited to get him there and have others to care for him. There were problems with the surgery from the beginning. The doctor was rushed for time and couldn’t complete the peg part of the surgery for Jeff’s feeding tube until the next day. This began this 5 day stretch of no food or fluids. When I first saw Jeff it was such a relief to see him with his mouth shut and that tube at least out. The feeling was short lived however as the next day the nasty doctor said ” Now we wait and see if he is happy to be alive or if he wishes he was dead”. When Jeff woke up he was terrified. It was difficult seeing him so scared. He kept trying to talk and get up but of course couldn’t. No one was trying to help or explain anything to him. It gutted me leaving him that way but since my visits were only 2 hours I had no choice. Meanwhile, they continued not feeding him because they said he was throwing up. I asked for IV fluids but they said no.  The next day when I went back in they had completely knocked him back out with heavy sedation. Jeff was supposed to be released to the care center a week or so after the trach surgery, but it never happened. the next day when I went to visit him I noticed his urine bag was cloudy. The nurse hadn’t noticed. She took some samples and ended up leaving them on his bed. Never turned them in. So it wasn’t until the next shifts nurse took different urine samples that they actually checked for a UTI.  I asked for an antibiotic but everyone was reluctant to do anything because he was already signed off by infectious disease. I started realizing what I feared all along: they weren’t going to let him leave alive. He went downhill very quickly. They had him on so many different drugs when he died. They could not keep his BP up. I’m no nurse, but common sense made me ask if we could take him off some of the heavy sedation and drugs he was on to help the BP issues, but they said they did not want him alert and awake to know what was going on. Part of me thinks he was overdosed, part of me thinks they starved him to death, and part of me thinks it was the untreated UTI. It was probably a combination of them all, but I will never know. I do know that my husband did not die of covid though like his death certificate says. He survived their neglect, abuse and over drugging for as long as he could….72 days of pure hell. They encouraged me not to have him resuscitated because it would be the same outcome. He passed away on September 25th, 2021. One part of the nightmare was over and another was just beginning.

Other notes:

They never asked me if we wanted to donate his organs. A fact the funeral home seemed perplexed by.

I received a letter from the hospital a few months after the died stating that 7 hospital employees were fired for viewing his records when they weren’t a part of his care team

I contacted several lawyers. I was told since I didn’t have an autopsy and the death was listed as covid they couldn’t help me. I found one lawyer to look at it but he came back and said there was no evidence of negligence by the hospital and by that time I was past my 1 year mark.