Battling COVID in the ICU
The virus attacked Pauline’s compromised respiratory system mercilessly. Dillon described sitting beside her bed in the ICU, listening to the rhythmic hiss of oxygen machines.
“I remember one night,” he said, “She looked at me and whispered, ‘Don’t let me go, Dillon. Not yet.’”
He held her hand until nurses asked him to step out.
Despite the severity of her condition, Pauline fought fiercely. She had faced death before — at nearly 700 pounds — and she had clawed her way back to life once. Somewhere inside, that same fighter still existed.
She survived COVID, but the consequences were heavy. She developed a painful, unhealing bedsore. Her lungs weakened. Her appetite vanished completely. Doctors struggled to find a nutritional plan that her body could handle.
“She was starving,” Dillon said, “but not because she didn’t want to eat — because she physically couldn’t.”
The slow decline: “We kept hoping… but she kept fading.”
By early autumn, Pauline’s organs struggled to keep up. She slipped in and out of sleep more often, sometimes losing track of conversations or forgetting what day it was. Her breathing became shallow. And then came the scariest phrase a doctor ever said to the family:
“We’re concerned about respiratory failure.”
Dillon tried to stay strong, but in his video he admitted, “That’s when it hit me. That’s when I thought… I might lose her.”
Pauline was moved to a rehab facility, where the family hoped she might rebuild enough strength for corrective treatment. But her condition continued to decline.