San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
GOD SPARED MY LIFE. WHY?’
COVID-19 survivor in early days of pandemic struggles with loss as family mourns patriarch
Mariquita Baluyot wasn’t expected to survive the coronavirus.
When the 68yearold grandmother was brought into a San Jose hospital in early March, her doctors tried everything to help her. With her organs failing, they had one option: Put her on life support, and induce a coma.
Baluyot eventually recovered, shocking her daughters and her doctors. But when she awoke in May after two months in a coma, the world was different.
The Bay Area had shut down, masks had become mandatory, and her husband of 45 years, who’d also fallen ill with the virus, had died. But she didn’t yet know that: Her daughters’ kept the loss from her for weeks, hoping she’d recover more before they shared the news.
Baluyot and her family were among the first people to contract the coronavirus in the Bay Area. Now, the family faces a life without a beloved father and husband. They’re among thousands of Bay Area families that have lost a loved one to COVID19 and are enduring devastating grief, with the regional death toll above 2,400.
“I cannot believe it,” Baluyot said, crying, in a recent interview. “My life has been turned upside down. I never expected in my wildest dreams that my hus‘
band would be gone.”
Nearly 10 months after becoming sick, Baluyot is still recovering, physically and emotionally. Over the course of a month, she had to relearn how to speak, eat and walk.
Before getting sick, Baluyot lived with her husband Jesus, 70, in San Diego. He was a stoic man with gentle eyes who didn’t say much, yet had a strong presence.
They adored traveling — walking along the Berlin Wall and taking mud baths in Jerusalem. A trip to Hawaii in February was supposed to be just the latest in a string of adventures. Now, it seems likely that’s where they both became infected.
The couple flew from San Jose to Hawaii on Feb. 8 with their daughter Jenilee Silva, Silva’s husband and their 3yearold grandson. The trip was in honor of Jesus’ 70th birthday.
Silva remembers her father watching CNN reports at their hotel of the coronavirus spreading to European cities.
“I vividly remember my dad saying, ‘ I’m so worried. This is bad,’ ” Silva said.
Like many people, they still aren’t sure how they got the virus. Was it the woman coughing during the luau? Could it have been one of the people on their bus tour?
The family flew home Feb. 18. About five days later, Baluyot and her husband started feeling sick — severe body chills and headaches. Several days later, Silva drove her parents to urgent care.
When Silva asked for a coronavirus test, doctors said her family didn’t qualify. They hadn’t left the country or come into contact with anyone else who had left. They were sent home.
On Feb. 29, Mariquita Baluyot was admitted to El Camino Hospital in Los Gatos after her unrelenting fever spiked to 103 degrees and she had
“Her mental state was really crucial in her recovery. If she knew that my dad had passed, I don’t know if she would have recovered.”
difficulty breathing. She was placed in isolation and tested for the coronavirus.
Her husband didn’t want to leave his wife at the hospital, but doctors said it was too riskyfor him to stay.
Silva and her sister, Jasmine Igtanloc, also got sick for a week or so and were terrified.
“I had moments where I thought, ‘ Am I going to die?’ ” Igtanloc recalled.
Meanwhile, their mother was deteriorating. She was transferred on March 9 to Regional Medical Center in San Jose, where she was placed on a life support machine to preserve her heart and lung function.
While she was on life support, Baluyot received the antiviral medicine remdesivir and leronlimab, a therapy for severe and critical COVID patients that was used under the FDA’s emergency new drug program.
Still, doctors didn’t think she would survive and scheduled an endoflife visit for her daughters.
The day after Baluyot was placed on life support, Silva took her father, who had also become extremely ill, to Stanford, where he was immediately intubated. Nine days later, a nurse held up a cell phone as his daughters said “I love you” for the last time and watched him take his final breaths through FaceTime.
“I promised him I wouldn’t let the doctors give up on our mom,” Igtanloc said, sobbing. “I just kept ... telling him that I loved him so much.”
Silva said saying goodbye on a screen was devastating.
“It’s so difficult when you can’t be by their bedside to hold their hand and hug them and just feel them,” she said. “This pandemic robs you of that opportunity to have proper closure.”
After losing their father, the sisters were relieved when their mother started to recover. Doctors took Baluyot off life support after her oxygen levels, blood pressure and lung function improved. When she finally awoke, doctors advised the daughters to wait until she was better before telling her the news of her husband’s death.
“Her mental state was really crucial in her recovery,” Igtanloc said. “If she knew that my dad had passed, I don’t know if she would have recovered.”
Baluyot was discharged on May 1 and sent to a rehabilitation facility, where she stayed until early June before returning to her Silva’s San Jose home.
That’s when her daughters knew it was time to tell her.
Baluyot said she is distraught when she looks at the picture of her husband from the funeral. “I didn’t see him, and he passed away,” she said. “I imagine him talking to me all the time.”
Today, Baluyot is recovering well. At a virtual appointment this month, her doctors were pleased by her improvement.
“It’s great to see a patient do well, and you’re doing wonderfully,” said Dr. Sang Lee, the chairman of the hospital’s surgery department.
Now, Baluyot is getting ready to move back to San Diego. Silva and her husband are packing up their San Jose home to join her. Baluyot said she wants to be closer to the garden her husband spent hours cultivating — full of orchids, plumeria, and olive and persimmon trees.
She knows it will be an adjustment to a life without her partner.
“Every time I see ( his picture), I cry because I remember all the good things that he has done,” she said. “God spared my life. Why?”