Ward Lewis Hospital Fund

Ward Lewis was admitted to Parkview Regional Health Center on February 19th with Influenza A like symptoms. He was passing out in the car on the way to the hospital and they had to give him oxygen support right away. He had a severe hacking cough with abdominal pain. To us in the here and now this sounds like covid, but on February 19th the hospitals were not looking for covid so they declared that just had a really bad flue. Within a few days he had to be placed on a vent because he was simply not getting enough oxygen. While on the vent the hospital attempted to do a MRI but he could not lay flat and also breath, they then decided to to a CT scan and found that one of his lungs was filling with fluid and they inserted a tube into his lung, within a couple of days a tube had to go into his other lung and further investigation found that he had necrotizing pneumonia and that half of one of his lungs would need to be removed if he survived the illness. He was constantly septic and had a staph infection at the same time. His blood pressure both skyrocketed multiple times and crashed on more than one occasion causing the hospital to need to use lopressor to keep his BP from killing him. One evening I was there it had hit 227 over 96 which is hypertensive crisis, an hour later it was only down to 182/79 an improvement to be sure but still in hypertension stage 3. It is now under control, maybe I should say for now.

After a little over two weeks on the vent they had to switch him to a tracheotomy and put a feeding tube into his stomach. Both of the lung tubes and the feeding tube caused further infections. They eventually did the lung surgery because they could not wait any longer and had to risk it while he was still very sick. As of this date he has been moved to step down and will be possibly getting out of the hospital in a week and be moved to a rehabilitation facility to rebuild muscle lost with seven weeks and counting in bed. Ward went into the hospital when the world was completely different than it is now. He will not recognize a country where no one can go out to eat or to church (if you did not already know he is a retired pastor) Most importantly though he desperately needs to be tested for covid antibodies because if he had it, he may eventually be able to resume a semi normal if very cautious life for the few years he has left. If he did not have covid he needs to live in a complete bubble, were he to contract it after what he has been through he would most certainly die.