He got the virus. And so did she. How couple found way to survive
Seniors faced long odds with husband needing ventilator, wife also battling lung cancer
The 72-year-old patient came in on a stretcher, his chest rising and falling as he struggled to fill his lungs. When Monique Visser saw him, she knew it didn’t look right.
As a nurse, Visser was ready to see COVID-19 in her emergency room, having spent the previous week preparing for the global pandemic barrelling its way toward her hospital, Sarnia’s Bluewater Health.
But as a daughter, nothing could have prepared her for the arrival of this particular patient, or the specific horror she felt when she saw his chest X-ray. “We had Googled a few days prior with coworkers, ‘What does COVID look like on an X-ray?’ ” she said.
“And when I saw my dad’s X-ray, I was like oh my goodness. That’s COVID.”
On the morning of March 24, her father, Dirk Meeder, had texted to say he was feeling better after fighting a strange illness; by the end of the day, Visser was tearfully hugging him goodbye through rustling layers of personal protective gear so that her hospital colleagues could put a tube down his throat.
But that was just the first blow delivered to the Meeder family by the coronavirus.
Within days, their mother, Aty, 71, already battling stage four lung cancer, spiked a fever and a cough that ultimately brought her to the same hospital as her husband.
Aty and Dirk are the mama and papa to four grown children and the oma and opa to 15 grandkids; in the Meeder family solar system, they are the sun around which everyone circles. So when COVID came for them both, the family braced for dark days. The virus has proven ruthless for people over 70, especially those who need mechanical ventilation, like Dirk, or have serious medical conditions, like Aty.
These were two people who, based on COVID’s track record, were not supposed to survive.
The Meeder kids first confronted their parents’ mortality nearly a year before a mystery virus began sickening people in Wuhan, China. On April 2, 2019, Aty Meeder — an avid cyclist who never smoked — was diagnosed with advanced lung cancer that had metastasized to her spine. Doctors gave her three to six months.
The diagnosis was devastating but Aty and Dirk confronted the news with their characteristic Dutch stoicism and “onward, ho” attitude. From the day they met at a church youth house in Rotterdam — where Dirk tried to impress Aty with his new job at a chemical plant and she was drawn to his big brown eyes — they had a united approach to life’s challenges, which they faced with positivity and a sense of adventure. They confronted Aty’s cancer diagnosis with the same spirit. Over the past year, the retirees continued travelling the world, flying to South Africa and biking through the Laurentian mountains. Robert Meeder, their oldest child, recalled how people were often startled by Aty’s terminal diagnosis, given how healthy she seemed. “She was still riding her bike to her palliative care appointments,” he said.
In February, the couple took their four children — Robert, Erik, Monique and Maarten — to Costa Rica to celebrate their 50th wedding anniversary. There was an undercurrent of sadness, but at the back of everyone’s minds was cancer, not coronavirus, which at that point was just a joke someone would make while drinking their Corona beer.
Back in Sarnia one month later, however, COVID was becoming real. In early March, Aty was already isolating at home, while Dirk would only occasionally step out for groceries or coffee with friends. On March 14, Dirk stopped leaving the house, too.
“I was like OK, that’s great that you’re taking it seriously, keep Mom safe,” said Robert, who works in Orillia as a pediatrician. “We knew that with her age and diagnosis, she had a high, high, high risk.”
But about a week later, as everyone was worrying about Aty, Dirk started feeling unwell. “His stomach was upset, but no fever,” Meeder recalled. “We said, we’ll just watch, he probably ate something wrong.”
On March 24, Dirk suddenly became so sick he could hardly stand. Aty, who was a nurse for 18 years at the hospital where her daughter now works, could see it was serious.
At Bluewater Health, Monique Visser was working her 11 a.m. shift in the emergency room when she got the text from her mom: Dad is coming in an ambulance. She briefed her co-workers on his symptoms and nobody suspected respiratory issues until the paramedics reported his low oxygen levels.
“When I first saw my dad on the stretcher, I was like oh my goodness, this is not the same guy I talked to the night before,” Visser said. “You could tell he was working to breathe.”
Then they saw his chest X-ray — COVID’s telltale pattern, all over both lungs. Dirk was moved into a negative pressure room.
The doctor explained to Visser that her father needed mechanical ventilation and the hospital would require informed consent. She knew this was a decision Dirk would need to make with Aty, so Visser received special permission to enter his room and call up her mother.
The couple decided to say yes to the ventilator. Then they said their goodbyes.
“It was hard,” Visser said, her voice catching. “I knew as a nurse, and my mum knew as a nurse, there was a big chance my dad wouldn’t be coming off the ventilator.”
Visser then asked Dirk if he wanted to video chat with her oldest brother. Robert Meeder had been seeing patients virtually, from his Orillia office, when he got the text that his dad was in hospital, needing intubation.
“I said to my patient, I gotta hang up, I have a family emergency. I literally cut them off mid-sentence,” he said.
He was already driving when he got another text: Papa’s going to FaceTime you. Meeder pulled over.
In true Dirk fashion, the conversation began with practical matters: what the doctors said about intubation, the rules around visitors. “He was taking care of business,” Meeder said. “And then he says, take care of your mom. I’m not worried about the other side.”
When it was Visser’s turn to say goodbye, she told her dad she loved him and wrapped him in a hug. Then she left the room to watch from a distance.
The nurse in charge gently urged Visser to leave; intubations don’t always go smoothly, and patients sometimes struggle. But the insertion was “textbook perfect” and Visser could tell from the way her dad tapped his hands at his side that he was calm.
Later, another nurse told Visser her dad had simply lain back and said: let’s do this, we got this. But the medical team had to pause; their masks had fogged up from their tears.
Everyone in her department was in shock and tears that day, she said. “COVID that day became real for our emergency department.”
Nobody could visit Dirk once he was moved into the intensive care unit, where he was in a medically induced coma. The family’s only connection to him was through his medical team.
“All day we would wait around anxiously for that one phone call,” Visser said. “That feeling is just horrible.”
But as Dirk was fighting for his life, Aty was developing a fever and a cough. The children despaired; they worried about her being alone in the condo and she was refusing to go to the hospital.
“I thought it was clear that she almost certainly had coronavirus as well,” Meeder says. “At that point, I thought I was going to lose both my parents.”
On April 1, the family got news that Meeder half-suspected of being an April Fool’s joke. Dirk was recovering well and his doctor thought he could be taken off the ventilator for a trial run, to see if he could take a breath on his own. If that went well, they would take him off the machine the following day.
The stakes were high. If Dirk’s lungs weren’t ready yet for “extubation,” he would have to be re-intubated — but the risks of trying a second time were even higher and it might not be advisable, Meeder said. “I knew, from a medical perspective, we had one shot at this.”
Aty was on standby over the phone for the trial run. If things went south, she would have to decide quickly whether to let her husband go. The doctor updated her throughout: He’s doing well. He’s still tolerating it.
You know what, I think we’ll keep going and just keep him off the ventilator.
The next update came an hour later, and it was the best one yet: it worked and Dirk will call you in half an hour.
When Aty heard him speak, his voice sounded totally different due to the damage to his vocal cords. But she knew it was her husband because even in his hazy state, he asked how she was doing and oh yes, did you have your chemotherapy appointment?
Aty didn’t have the heart to say chemo had been postponed because she had also tested positive for COVID.
The following day, Aty’s oxygen levels had dropped and she could no longer finish a sentence without coughing. COVID had finally worn her down. She decided to go to the hospital.
“I think my mom fought it until she knew my dad was going to be OK,” Visser says. “And then she kind of let herself go.”
Visser called 911 for her mother, who was too short of breath, and phoned her hospital colleagues to say her other parent was now coming. Like her husband, Aty was pragmatic and as she waited for the paramedics, she tidied up and put food in the freezer to keep it from spoiling.
At the hospital, Aty was put on an IV, oxygen and antibiotics. At that point in time, her husband, in a different unit, had not yet been told his wife was now in the hospital. Dirk was still incredibly weak, unable to lift his arms or legs. “Everybody had been sitting on pins and needles, wondering if our dad would be back … not just alive, but to what level of function,” Meeder says.
But the next day saw considerable improvements and Dirk was ready to be moved to the COVID ward. “He was kind of grumpy,” Visser recalls. “(He said) they’re going to move me to that COVID floor and I don’t even have COVID. I said, ‘Dad, you do have COVID!’ He didn’t realize it all yet.”
And once he was wheeled into his new room, any annoyance evaporated when he noticed his roommate.
“He looked around and he saw me. Hey, it’s you!” Aty recalled, laughing. “The first thing he said when he saw me was, man, you look like your 93-year-old mother.”
“That was kind of a surprise, a nice surprise,” Dirk chimed in. “And things basically just went uphill from there, eh?”
Eleven days after their parents’ battle with COVID began, the Meeders were finally able to collectively exhale. “We were so happy,” Robert said. “We knew they were getting on the other end of it.”
Aty was discharged on Good Friday, one week after she was admitted. Dirk was supposed to stay another week or two for rehabilitation but once his wife was discharged, he was determined to follow her home. “I really wanted to get out,” he said. “If the doctor had said no, I would have gone on my own.” He was back in the condo by Easter Sunday dinner.
COVID has been a harrowing experience for the Meeder family — perhaps for Visser especially, since she also later tested positive for COVID as well as her father-in-law, who was confirmed positive a few days after Dirk. But she and others have drawn strength from their parents, who never wavered in their courage and positivity.
Unsurprisingly, Dirk and Aty are now focused on the practical matters ahead. Dirk is working on his physiotherapy and making astonishing progress; when he was first extubated, he couldn’t even put his glasses on. Today, he is doing daily laps around their penthouse balcony.
After a seven-week pause, Aty is restarting her chemotherapy and turning her focus back to keeping her terminal cancer at bay. But she is already looking forward to her next bike ride, planned for Mother’s Day. “Even if we cannot bike, we are happy to bike one circle in the garage and check mark, we did it.”
They are unsentimental when looking back. Describing his week in the ICU on “the ventilator thing,” Dirk simply says “I got in and I got out. And that was good.”
They know they are lucky, though. They’ve seen the COVID statistics and they’ve read the obituaries for patients who did not survive. They say their Christian faith, family, community and the health-care system all came together to carry them through. They believe their blessings were given by God.
But most of all, they credit each other. “We had all the odds against us,” Aty said. “I know that together, we can do a lot ... We don’t face the future with fear.”
“All day we would wait around anxiously for that one phone call. That feeling is just horrible.” MONIQUE VISSER DAUGHTER AND A NURSE AT THE HOSPITAL WHERE HER PARENTS WERE TREATED