Eddie Negrón, a physician full of fun, is dead at 69

Patricia Negrón and Diane Larsen have been best friends since kindergarten, so Larsen was always ready to step in and help her pal with Eddie, that dancing husband of hers.

“He’d never tire, and I didn’t either,” Larsen recalled in a telephone interview. “Pat would say, ‘Here, you take him for a while.’ He was a fabulous dancer.”

He was a great jokester, too.

“Always a fun, humorous kind of guy,” another friend, Dick Roberts, said, “until it was time to get serious about ‘You need to do this medically.’”

Roberts wasn’t just a friend; he was also a patient. Fun-loving, dancing Eddie was Dr. Eddie Negrón, a longtime internist in Fort Walton Beach, Florida, on the Emerald Coast.

If Negrón was a good dancer, he was an even better doctor. Roberts’ niece in Ohio was once having a problem that her own doctors couldn’t diagnose that turned out to be an extremely rare condition. Negrón, Roberts said, diagnosed it from 800 miles away.

“I said, ‘Eddie, have you ever had a patient with this condition?’” Roberts said. “And he said, ‘No, but I remember it from medical school.’”

In early July Negrón contracted the coronavirus. His daughter Marisa Hutchinson said the family doubts his medical work was the source.

“As a physician he’d been wearing a mask in public for months now,” she said. “Gloves, everything.”

Negrón died of COVID-19 on July 23 at the Fort Walton

Beach Medical Center. He was 69. His death startled friends and family members, who said it should be a warning to those not taking the disease seriously.

“If there’s anybody who knows how to stay away from infectious diseases and to treat them,” Rob