Kaleb started showing symptoms of being sick after a day of mud-ridding with our two oldest boys and his father. He came home that Saturday, coughing and his nose stopped up, and fell asleep that evening and didn’t get up until Monday morning when he had to start packing for work.

He was a towboater and had just been promoted to Tankerman with his company. They worked out of Louisiana and traveled up and down the Mississippi delivering cargo.

He barely managed to get up Monday and was dragging around a lot. I finally managed to get some sinus medicine in him, and he told me he felt 100% better after he got in it in his system, so I figured he had a bad sinus infection.

We got him packed and I dropped him off at the meeting place Tuesday evening, June 29th – they carpooled most of the time to save money. He hugged our three boys goodbye and kissed me before getting into the van and heading off.

I got a call Thursday, July 1st, that he had been taken off the boat and placed in isolation in a hotel in Gretna. He’d gotten on the boat the day before and fallen asleep and no one had been able to wake him up. When he finally got up, he had a fever and a bad cough along with a headache so they tested him for Covid. It came back positive.

He face-timed me multiple times so he could speak with the boys and see them. Nothing seemed different than when he was at home – he complained of a bad cough and a headache. I tried to get him to take the sinus medicine again every time he called so he could get some relief and get something to eat but I’m not sure if he ever did.

He told me the hotel staff were bringing him food and things to drink. But he wasn’t eating because he had no appetite. He was drinking a lot. I found that out when we went to collect his things from the hotel room. We found it completely littered with empty water and Gatorade bottles. He stayed in the hotel room from July 1st-July 3rd.

Friday, July 3rd, I got a face-time from him around one that evening. He was in the emergency room at Ochsner Medical Center West Bank Campus getting a ‘saline’ IV drip. I’m not sure if that’s what it really was, but that’s what he told me. He said he’d fallen trying to get up and get the food the hotel staff had brought him and couldn’t move his legs.

He’d refused to eat for five days, so I could understand why. He face-timed me and I could see he was hooked up to a drip and had a canula in his nose. He said when he got there, they said his oxygen was around 90-92 on room air. So they put it in to help him.

He told me he was feeling 1000% better since they gave him the saline IV. They were talking about putting him in an normal hospital room for observation. She said that he’d text me later when he got the room number. Kaleb said it was likely they’d let him either go back to the hotel the next day or let me come get him to bring him home.

Around that time, a nurse walked in with another bag. He tried to hang up because he was terrified of needles and didn’t want the boys to see him panicking. But the nurse told him to leave it on so he could talk to me while she set it up. I asked her what it was that they were hooking him up to since he was already better with the saline. She told me it was an antibiotic and didn’t say anything more.

I asked what antibiotic it was because as far as I knew, Covid was a virus and viruses had to run their course. She said, “It’s just an antibiotic. We’re putting him on it just in case.” I asked again what it was. She finally told me ‘Remdesivir’.

At the time, I didn’t know any better. We didn’t know what the poison did to people. At that time, we believed it was something that was going to help him. Though I still didn’t fully understand why they were putting him on an antibiotic when he had a virus.

I got a call later that evening with a nurse telling me they were just getting around to moving him into a normal room. She gave me the name of a doctor that I never got to speak with. That’s when my living hell started.

At eight the next morning, I got a call from the hospital informing me that Kaleb had suddenly taken a turn for the worst and had been moved into ICU and placed on a high-flow BiPap at 100% due to his oxygen dropping down to 82. The doctor I spoke to told me I was free to come down and visit with him in the ICU at any time I wanted. I asked him if it was normal for Covid patients to go down hill as fast as what he had and was answered with ‘yes, this is normal. We’ve seen this happen several times at this stage in the illness’.

My dad and I went down that day after making sure my mom could handle taking care of the three boys to take Kaleb a charger for his phone because I was told we could face-time him but no one had brought a charger in with him and to visit with him. When we got there, I went up to the ICU and was led to the little chapel and made to wait almost an hour before someone came to get me. The nurse who showed up immediately asked me how long ago I had been exposed. I wasn’t thinking straight at the time and told them it’d been over seven days – I think it was actually five days since I’d been exposed. She gave me a strange look but led me back to where his room was. They wouldn’t allow me inside to see or speak with him, so I had to look at my husband through the glass wall. He was covered in wires and IVs and that horrible looking BiPap. He waved at me and gave me a thumbs up before sending me a text to tell me he loved me. He lit up so much when he saw me that it made me think everything would be okay and he’d be home soon.

The nurse told me they had just gotten him cleaned up from where he’d had an ‘accident’, so that was why I couldn’t go it.  I was then informed that he was only allowed one visitor per day for an hour slot, but was again told I could face-time him all I wanted to. I told her his doctor had told me before I came down that I could visit him whenever I wanted to and talk with him. She informed me that wasn’t possible and again that he could only have one visitor for an hour per day. I had to leave soon after that as he fell asleep. As I was leaving, there was a woman in the room beside him, ‘screaming’ for help because she couldn’t breath but the nurses were ignoring her. My stomach twisted into knots then. Something felt off as I left the hospital. I wanted to move him back to Mississippi so we could be closer and I could get there faster in case something happened, but everyone assured me that Ochsner was one of the best hospitals around and he was in the best hands he could be.

I called the hospital every two hours after that to check on him, but was given the extreme bare minimum of information. I had to demand to know how he was, what his oxygen was at, if he was still panicking, was he sleeping or awake, etc. They always told me nothing had changed, his oxygen was up at 93 and staying there as long as the BiPap was on but was dropping to 88 or 86 when they took his mask off to give him breathing treatments.

I got the first call at 4:22 AM on July 5th that they were about to intubate him and I needed to come down immediately. I asked the nurse just what was going on, and she informed me that if the Lasix didn’t work to get the fluid that had suddenly built up around his lungs off, they were going to intubate him. I told her I had three young children I had to find a sitter for and a three and a half hour drive and couldn’t be there immediately but that I would try to be there soon.  I couldn’t get a hold of my parents or his to watch the boys, and our oldest – a five-year-old – didn’t want to get in the car.  I was at wit’s end trying to find someone to watch the boys so I could go down.

Four hours later, the hospital called back and told me that they had gotten the fluid off of him and weren’t intubating him so there was no need to rush. I asked how his x-rays looked since the Lasix worked, how the fluid looked and if his lungs were clear. They told me they didn’t do x-rays or anything like that on him because there’d been no reason to and the doctor hadn’t ordered it then hung up. I couldn’t figure out how they decided there was fluid around his lungs without having done an x-ray or any other testing but let it go. My father-in-law called me soon after that and asked if he could be Kaleb’s visitor that day.

When he called me back after seeing Kaleb, he told me the nurses had allowed him in to sit with him for 30 minutes and were upset with me because I had told them I had already been exposed for seven days when Kaleb told them he’d seen me last on Tuesday before he’d been admitted. I promptly informed him I did not care about them being upset and demanded to know how he’d been allowed in to visit when I’d been told I had to stay outside the room. He said he told them he’d been vaxxed and they’d let him in. He then informed me if I wanted to come down again, they’d said I needed to be tested and bring proof I was negative. He also took the chance to tell me to test the boys for Covid because they could catch it and give it to him (father-in-law) despite him being vaxxed against it.

I called the hospital again every two hours until I put the boys to bed. The last nurse I got told me everything was stable but his panicking was getting worse when his mask came off and that he was sleeping more. In between calls, I received one from one of the workers there who handled insurance who wanted to confirm Kaleb’s primary care doctor in our town because it looked like he would be discharged in ‘possibly a week’ and wanted to set up the appointments to visit and go ahead and send in prescriptions he would need once he came home.

I made the stupid decision to not let the boys face-time Kaleb while he was in the hospital because I thought it would be too scary for them to see him hooked up and covered like what he was – our boys were 1, 3, and 5 at the time. I should have let them call him then and see him. The last nurse I spoke with told me Kaleb couldn’t talk but we could watch him. I just couldn’t bring myself to do it. I didn’t want our boys to see their daddy in that kind of state. He texted with me once or twice a day when he was awake, sending messages to let the boys and I know he loved and missed us that night and the next day. I continued calling to check on him every two to four hours on July 5th since I couldn’t make it down to visit.

I got up the next morning, July 6th, and called to check on him. I was told he was still on high flow oxygen from the BiPap but his oxygen was staying at 93 and he was doing better other than the slight panicking he did when they took his mask off to do breathing treatments. At noon, he sent me a message telling me he loved me.

At 5:57 that evening, I got a phone call from one of the nurses at the hospital.

She informed me that they were intubating Kaleb immediately as he’d taken a sudden turn for the worst and I needed to get down there as fast as I could. I asked her if he had become that bad in just the few hours since I’d last checked on him. She replied ‘yes. Get down here immediately.’ I informed her I couldn’t be there immediately as I had to find someone to keep the boys and I had a three and a half hour drive to get there. She politely told me to ‘find someone to take the kids and get your ass down here.’

Needless to say, I began panicking and raced to my parents to drop the kids off so I could get to the hospital. My mom and dad stopped me from leaving immediately and told me to calm down, that it wasn’t the best situation to happen, but we’d get down there soon enough and see him. I argued with them for several minutes to let me leave until my phone went off again with another call from the hospital at 6:10 pm. A rather cheerful sounding doctor asked if I was Mrs. Hall and then proceeded to ask me if a nurse had called to tell me they were intubating my husband. I replied yes and got a very sick feeling in my stomach.

“Well, she told you wrong. We’re not intubating him. It’s much, much worse than that. Mr. Hall’s heart has stopped.”

My knees gave way and my mom caught the phone in time before it broke and put the doctor on speaker phone so she could hear what was going on. The doctor repeated himself then proceeded to tell us that they’d sat Kaleb up for his breathing treatment and he’d told the doctor ‘something doesn’t feel right/ something’s wrong’  before collapsing and his heart stopped beating. I was assured they were ‘doing everything they could to try and bring him back.’

My mom called my father-in-law as we got into the car and informed him of what had happened, and we rushed off toward the hospital. We were on the road for a few minutes before the phone started ringing again. At 6:33 pm, the same doctor called to tell me that Kaleb had coded and they hadn’t been able to bring him back. He was called at 6:21 pm on July 6th, 2021.