Chippewa Valley residents share tales of death, sickness, stress, quarantine, hope
Mar. 19—EAU CLAIRE — After a full year of COVID-19, the sweet strains of Johnny Nash singing "It's gonna be a bright, bright sunshiny day" regularly waft through the halls of an Eau Claire hospital.
Playing "I Can See Clearly Now" over the public address system has become an emotional but treasured tradition every time a COVID-19 patient is discharged from Marshfield Medical Center-Eau Claire.
It's the sound of hope.
Such optimism often has been hard to come by in the long, difficult year since last March 19 — the date of the first positive coronavirus test in Eau Claire County.
Not only did hundreds of Chippewa Valley residents die and thousands get sick from the virus, but nearly everyone's life was affected in some way.
It was a year filled with business closures, layoffs, wage cuts, canceled travel plans, working from home, wearing masks, avoiding gatherings and the fear of the unknown as folks tried to navigate — and survive — the pandemic.
Here are a few of their stories:
'Out of the blue'
The last time Marvin Whitman of Menomonie saw his parents in person was in late February 2020.
The following week their Waupaca senior living home went into lockdown, and visitation was suspended indefinitely.
Three months later, Whitman's parents, Robert and Beverly Whitman, got tested along with other residents of their long-term care facility. When the results came back the first week of June, both were positive.
Robert, 93, was taken to the hospital when his oxygen levels dropped alarmingly low but was sent back to his room when doctors determined he was too frail to be intubated. By June 11, when Marvin talked to Beverly, 92, she said she must be getting a cold. She was comatose the next morning.
Robert died June 13, and his wife followed three days later. Just like that, the virus had taken both of Marvin's parents.
"It happened so quickly and out of the blue," Marvin said. "The suddenness of it all was shocking."
It was a painful example of how quickly the virus can strike, especially for the elderly and those with pre-existing conditions, Marvin said.
"Just like that, the root, that hub of your life, is gone," said Marvin, who used to call his parents almost daily and had taken them on a number of trips in recent years.
Robert, a U.S. Navy veteran, had especially enjoyed attending reunions for family members of sailors who died when their ship, the USS Drexler, was sunk near Okinawa in World War II. Robert's older brother had been on that ship.
Even the funeral for Robert and Beverly, like so many others, was disrupted, with a virtual service preventing family members from even grieving together. The family held a funeral on Zoom Sept. 30 — what would have been the couple's 70th anniversary.
"A lot of sources say they were old, maybe it was their time," Marvin said. "But that's not how it works. It wasn't their time. It was the pandemic. And I feel in my heart of hearts that if it would have been taken more seriously from the beginning, maybe we would have had a better chance of not losing so many people."
Stressful year
While the pandemic affected nearly everybody in the past year, it dominated Dani Reed's life like few others in the Chippewa Valley.
Reed, a critical care nurse at Marshfield Medical Center-Eau Claire, has been on the front lines of the battle against COVID-19 from the beginning. She was there in the spring when patients were limited and cared for in regular units, and she was involved when case counts soared and the hospital opened a since-deactivated unit just for COVID patients.
The most difficult time, without question, was during the fall surge when every bed in the hospital was full.
"As an ICU nurse in the middle of the COVID-19 pandemic, I can tell you that it's scary as hell," Reed texted a colleague in November.
At that time, she reported being afraid daily that she was going to contract the virus and bring it home to her family. Every cough or sore throat sent her into a panic.
Reached this week during a much-deserved socially distanced vacation hiking in the Ozarks, Reed estimated that 90% of her patients in the past seven months have had COVID-19 — a highly contagious disease that has killed more than 538,000 Americans in the past year.
"This has absolutely been the most stressful time of my career, but probably one of the most rewarding times of my career as well," Reed said.
The reward comes primarily from seeing patients survive a disease everyone knows could kill them.
"It's amazing to see our patients go from so sick to being able to leave our COVID unit," Reed said. "That has been so incredibly great and my heart would just swell with pride to know I played a part in that."
Even now, Reed choked up talking about the custom that began in November of playing "I Can See Clearly Now" when COVID-19 patients are able to head home.
"To know that a person made it through COVID, that is pretty awesome," she said. "We are all so excited to push that button (to play the song)."
Dealing with so much adversity and death also has brought the staff closer together.
"We just banded together and were each other's rocks," Reed said. "We relied on each other and chucked along and got through it. It was awful and awesome at the same time."
At the peak of the surge Reed questioned if she could continue on in a field she had always loved, but she said this week she would never change her career choice.
Community support and gifts of gratitude from families of COVID-19 patients also have helped reinforce the importance of the work she and other health care workers do.
"You see the signs outside saying 'Heroes work here.' They truly made us feel like heroes," Reed said.
Too young?
Throughout the pandemic, public health officials have stressed that older adults have an increased risk of serious complications or death from COVID-19, but that the virus still poses a risk of potentially life-threatening lung failure even for young, previously healthy individuals.
Juan Pablo "J.P." Nunez, 23, of Eau Claire learned that lesson the hard way, nearly losing his life to the disease last fall.
Nunez, a manager at his family's Cancun Mexican Grill restaurants as well as a landlord and certified medical interpreter, took a precautionary COVID-19 test on Sept. 10 — the day before he was scheduled to fly to Mexico to visit his elderly grandmother.
When the result came back positive, he canceled his trip. He soon felt congested and developed a fever.
On Sept. 15 — just five days after his positive test — Nunez woke up with a 105 degree temperature and barely able to breathe. His girlfriend took him to the emergency department at Mayo Clinic Health System in Eau Claire.
He soon was admitted to the hospital, where his condition progressed from needing minor oxygen support to high-flow oxygen to being put on a ventilator.
At about the same time, Nunez's father was put on a ventilator with COVID-19 as well.
While his father responded well to the ventilator, Nunez's condition didn't improve even with maximum oxygen support from the ventilator. His care team decided to transport him by helicopter to Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota, where he was put on extracorporeal membrane oxygenation.
With ECMO, blood is pumped outside of the body to a heart-lung machine that removes carbon dioxide and sends oxygen-filled blood back to tissues in the body.
Upon waking up in Rochester, Nunez recalled being asked his name and other basic questions to assess his mental state. When asked his location, he said Mayo in Eau Claire, but was told he was in Rochester.
"I knew that something went wrong," he said. "But I thought, 'It's the best hospital in the world. If they can't cure me, nobody can.' "
After a week, his condition improved enough to no longer require ECMO support and he was able to go home. He was hospitalized for a total of three weeks.
As of last month, Nunez was the youngest patient to require ECMO for COVID-19 at Mayo in Rochester.
"I'm very thankful for the care I received," he said, "and I'm thankful I didn't go to Mexico because they don't have that technology."
Six months after his diagnosis, Nunez is back to work and has resumed working out, but reported that he still gets winded easily and struggles to run.
The experience was a reality check for Nunez.
"I really thought it was only really sick or really old people who could die of COVID, but now I know how close I was to not being here right now," he said.
60,000 swabs
On Thursday, Spec. Vance Grimm of Elk Mound marked one year since he began his duties administering COVID-19 tests for the Wisconsin Army National Guard.
In the beginning, with so little known about the disease and fear running rampant, Grimm acknowledged being uneasy about contracting the virus.
Still, he volunteered for the duty, personifying the words of Wisconsin's adjutant general, Maj. Gen. Paul Knapp, when describing the early days of the pandemic at a recent ceremony marking the one-year anniversary of Gov. Tony Evers declaring a public health emergency in the state: "It wasn't a time for us to shelter in place and ride out the storm. It was a call to action."
Grimm has no regrets.
"Honestly, it was something that was pretty amazing to be a part of," Grimm said. "It was rewarding to know I was able to help and serve the community in a time of fear when others were fearful of the unknown."
Still, his service didn't come without sacrifice.
Grimm went nearly four months without seeing his 5-year-old son, who has asthma, just to be safe.
"I was around a lot of people, and even though I had PPE, I wasn't 100% certain if I might have caught it," said Grimm, who has spent most of the last year swabbing people in the Madison and Eau Claire areas.
In that time, Grimm estimated he personally has taken more than 60,000 samples, all the while trying to comfort people nervous about the process, the safety protocols and the potential results.
Thankful for science
Bob and Joyce Wachsmuth of Eau Claire first felt ill in early January. Bob felt like a winter cold was coming on, and Joyce had a headache and chills.
Upon learning that Bob's co-worker had contracted COVID-19, the couple made appointments to get tested. Both tested positive.
Their care team at Mayo Clinic Health System in Eau Claire explained two available options: remote patient monitoring and monoclonal antibody therapy. Bob said they were interested in both.
They used the remote monitoring equipment — blood pressure cuff, thermometer, pulse oximeter and scale — so their vital signs and symptoms could be screened.
Bob's symptoms remained mild, but Joyce's condition worsened overnight. She experienced severe body pain.
The Wachsmuths qualified for monoclonal antibody therapy — an experimental treatment for people at high risk of hospitalization due to COVID-19 — because of their age and other health conditions. The treatment, available as part of an emergency use authorization from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, involves infusing a person's body with man-made antibodies meant to mimic antibodies a person's immune system makes after being exposed to the virus.
Bob and Joyce both began to feel much better soon after the antibody infusion. Ten days later, they reported feeling nearly back to normal. When contacted this week, Joyce said they were "totally back to what normal is for us."
"We are very grateful science has provided the knowledge to have the infusion available," said Joyce, who acknowledged that testing positive for the virus dominating the worldwide news was somewhat frightening.
While Bob was quite concerned about the diagnosis because of respiratory health issues, Joyce recalled thinking, "If this is what COVID symptoms are all about, I don't think I can handle this for 10 days."
"The infusion made a big difference to our COVID symptoms and peace of mind that we would not end up in the hospital, and especially not on a ventilator," Joyce said. "We are grateful that we were offered the experimental monoclonal antibodies and grateful our bodies healed."
'Happy' sound
For Gladys Webb, 75, of Eau Claire, like so many others, the beginning of the pandemic meant a drastic lifestyle adjustment.
Though she is retired, Webb still volunteered often at Chippewa Valley Museum and L.E. Phillips Senior Center.
Suddenly, she found herself following the advice of public health officials and staying home almost all the time.
"As the stories came out about people getting sick and dying, it was scary, so I stayed home," Webb said. "I didn't leave unless I had to get food or do something else that had to be done."
Her neighbors did the same.
"It was just so darn quiet up here it almost had an eerie feeling," she said of her west side neighborhood. "You never saw anybody and it was beginning to wear on people."
Her mood brightened one day when she heard her neighbor kids outside laughing and playing.
"They were just running around and having fun, and I thought, 'There is still life after COVID,' " Webb said. "I'll never forget that sound. It was so happy. It really lifted my spirits."
She since has met and befriended the parents and the children, and continues to enjoy their joyful sounds.
Webb also got her second dose of COVID-19 vaccine last Saturday, giving her hope that she — and other community members who have survived the pandemic — will live to see sunnier days ahead.
