A rural hospital fights to save principal’s life

Now, Smith says, he can hardly believe it all happened.

Sometimes, maybe riding together down the road, Greer Smith’s 11-year-old boy will speak up out of the blue.

“Dad, you know how I was real worried when you were in the hospital?” he’ll say. “I’m glad to be with you.”

The events of July and August, when Smith survived severe COVID-19 in Georgia’s last surge, seem to linger in the background for Smith’s son Kellan in a way they don’t for Smith himself.

For much of the experience, Smith was in a coma in a metro Atlanta hospital 200 miles away from home. Doctors put him in a coma in order to let an artificial lung machine work, filtering and oxygenating his blood then pumping it back into his body so his lungs could heal. Smith very nearly didn’t get to use the machine, called ECMO, because there weren’t enough for all the patients who needed it.Smith is principal of the only high school in Jeff Davis County. Dr. Jason Laney and the staff at the tiny 25-bed Jeff Davis Hospital in Hazlehurst repeatedly called more than 40 facilities across the Southeast asking them to place Smith in an ECMO bed. Eventually, Northside Hospital Gwinnett agreed to take him.

Looking back, one of his doctors there, Allison Dupont, was quite sure what Smith’s chances were without ECMO: “Zero.”

Now, Smith says, he can hardly believe it all happened.

His pulmonologist told him in amazement last week that his lungs showed virtually no scarring. Physical therapy, to regain the muscle he lost during the 23 days he was bedbound, is a remote memory. Smith spent the fall coaching football again, fishing, then going on hunting trips. His work as principal of Jeff Davis High School is back full speed.

After the AJC wrote his story, Smith appeared on CNN. Sitting in his fishing clothes, fresh off a Florida lake, he told his story and urged people to get vaccinated.

He and Stephanie weren’t vaccinated before he got sick, but now they’ve both had Moderna shots.

People around town know he has had the vaccine, and they come up and ask him about it. A “close, close friend” kept careful track as Smith went through side effects, and Smith assured him the vaccine left him OK. “He went and got it,” Smith said. “He went and got it.”

Smith and his wife Stephanie say they’ve changed a lot of minds. He wishes they could change more. “I just wish it hadn’t gotten so political so fast,” he said. “I hate it.”

But Smith is full of gratitude for getting a second round of life. He just celebrated Kellan’s 11th birthday. When Kellan brings up the hospitalization every month or so, Smith says, it’s obvious how to respond.

“Dad, I’m sure glad you’re here,” Kellan recently said.

“Buddy, I sure am too,” he replied.

COURTESY Greer Smith, with (from left) his daughter Emerson Rose, wife Stephanie, and son Kellan at Thanksgiving, feels his battle with COVID-19 is hard to believe as he looks back now on all that he went through. Smith of Hazlehurst barely survived the delta wave in the fall.

COURTESY Greer Smith is connected to an ECMO machine in August at Northside Hospital Gwinnett. The machine filters the patient’s blood and oxygenates it before returning it to the patient.