Dream cruise ends as tragedy of virus
Lying on a hospital bed 3,000 miles from home, Toyling Maa tried not to think about it.
She was mustering strength to survive this coronavirus pandemic, even if her husband of 42 years did not. The South San Francisco man died in a Miami hospital on Saturday, days after being diagnosed with COVID19 while on the trip of a lifetime with his wife and friends: a cruise in South America. The day he died, he waited six hours to be evacuated by ambulance from the
ship’s sick bay, where medical workers helped him breathe by manually pumping a handheld ventilator for four hours, his wife told The Chronicle.
Wilson Maa died alone after the ambulance took him away, leaving his wife, also sick with a fever and cough, behind in the ship’s sick bay. Hours later, she learned in a phone call with her daughter that her husband had passed away. He was 71. On Sunday, an ambulance came for her.
Toyling Maa, 64, first spoke to The Chronicle on Thursday about how she, her husband and hundreds of other passengers of the Coral Princess were stranded at sea, hoping the ship could dock in Florida so that sick passengers could get needed medical help. During the video call her husband could be heard moaning in the background.
On Monday, she spoke again in a video call with The Chronicle from her room inside Miami’s Jackson Memorial Hospital. A large air conditioning pipe stuck out of the wall, and little redbrown splotches formed a trail across the grimy floor. To Toyling, they looked like bloodstains.
She pressed her head against the hospital pillow, searching for words to describe a fourdecade love story.
Then she shook her head. “I’m trying not to think about it,” she said. “I’m trying to get myself better.”
It started as a dream vacation. Toyling and her husband saved up for years to tour Machu Picchu in Peru in February and then take the Coral Princess cruise ship around South America, stopping at the Amalia Glacier and braving the choppy waters of Cape Horn.
But after the trip ended, the nightmare began. The couple was supposed to disembark in Argentina on March 19 and fly home. But when the ship arrived in Buenos Aires, passengers learned the pandemic
— just a distant news story when they departed — had shut down the airport and closed the country’s borders. The couple opted to stay aboard the Coral Princess, which was headed to Florida. At the time, no one on board was sick.
But by the time the ship docked in Miami on Saturday, several passengers had tested positive for COVID19, including Wilson Maa. Others showed symptoms, his wife among them.
It would take hours before the sick passengers were taken to hospitals. One of the couple’s two daughters, Julie Maa of New York, called several hospitals in the Miami area to find out whether they had available intensive care beds. She called ambulance providers to find out why no one had come to pick up her father. Desperately, she took to social media, tweeting at anyone who might listen — radio stations and newspapers in Miami, the Coral Princess cruise line, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi.
The Chronicle left messages Saturday for the Florida governor’s office, the U.S. Coast Guard in Miami and Mayor Carlos Gimenez of MiamiDade County, which operates the seaport. None responded.
On Saturday at 8 p.m., after six hours of waiting, an ambulance took Wilson Maa to Larkin Community Hospital in South Miami, Toyling Maa said.
“My daughters were calling and calling the hospital to find out about his status,” Toyling Maa said on Monday. “Then at 1 a.m. the doctor called my daughter Julie to say that he had passed away.”
Meanwhile, Toyling Maa, who had a fever and a cough, waited to be evacuated from the ship’s sick bay. Hours ticked by, and three ambulances came and went. The fourth took Toyling Maa to Jackson Memorial. As she spoke to The Chronicle, she lay shivering in a hospital gown while “Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?” buzzed from a television set.
People shuffled in and out, bringing Tylenol and cough syrup, dressed head to toe in protective gear. “They don’t want to stay very long,” Toyling said, coughing. The hospital tested her for the coronavirus on Sunday, and she was still awaiting the results.
“It’s very strange,” she said. “I haven’t really seen a doctor.”
Wilson Maa grew up in San Francisco and studied engineering at California Polytechnic State University. He and Toyling met in the late 1970s after she graduated from Oberlin College in Ohio and moved to California. The couple raised two daughters, Nancy and Julie, in the San Mateo area.
They kept a tightknit group of friends from Wilson’s college who would often travel together, heading to Lake Tahoe for Christmas breaks or renting a boat to go salmon fishing in the summer.
“The husbands were all engineers, so their personalities were pretty similar,” said Toyling’s sister, Toykane Chew. “And the wives got along pretty well.”
As the friends headed into retirement, their connection grew stronger and their vacations got more elaborate. They took the South American cruise together — five couples in all — and photographs show them standing on the grand staircase of the ship’s atrium, or seated companionably at a dinner table. Toyling wore an orange sleeveless dress and smiled as she leaned against her husband, who had on a blue shirt and tie.
Julie Maa is determined to support her mother, even though Toyling Maa is in quarantine and the two can’t be in the same room. Julie asked the hospital to bring her mother a journal, so that Toyling could write down her thoughts without having to fixate on them.
“She doesn’t know what the world is like anymore,” Julie said. “She left before shelter in place.”
In a news update on its website, the Coral Princess said Monday that 545 passengers disembarked on Sunday and 139 departed Monday, leaving 274 on board.
At home in New York, Julie sighed wearily.
“There’s just a lot of paperwork,” she said. “And then there’s funeral stuff. And how do you even do a funeral in a pandemic? The world just doesn’t seem right.”