JACKSONVILLE, Fla. – After weeks under heavy sedation in a hospital, retired Air Force Maj. Gen. George N. Williams, 73, is awake and out of the COVID-19 ward of the Mayo Clinic in Jacksonville.
For weeks, his wife, Maryanne, stood outside, clutching rosary beads while staring up at his hospital window.
“My mom would silently pray the rosary and she would cry,” said their son, Ryan Williams.
His mother and father both tested positive for COVID-19 on Oct. 22. His mother recovered quickly. Two weeks later, his father was admitted to the hospital in Melbourne, Florida, where he eventually developed blood clots in his heart and leg. He was moved to the intensive care unit.
“They said there are only two options,” Ryan Williams said. “The first one is that he can have his leg amputated, but he will never wake up ... or -- and this was his recommendation -- they give him a few days of peace and allow him to just succumb to the leg, but to have a better quality of life for a few days, you know, to say goodbye to us.”
His mother began calling Mayo Clinic, where a family friend had been treated, and coordinated an effort to have her husband transferred to the hospital more than two hours away.
“My mother is the hero of this story, and, my dad, I don’t think will ever really know how hard she had to fight,” Ryan Williams said. “Because nobody wanted to transfer him. Nobody. And she didn’t take no for an answer and she wouldn’t take the fact that there wasn’t hope.”
Doctors at Mayo Clinic removed the clot from Maj. Gen. Williams’ heart and amputated his leg after the blood clot in his leg didn’t dissolve, according to his son.
But the Williams family pays the most credit to Maj. Gen. Williams’ nurse: James.
“This nurse came on named James and he changed everything,” said Ryan Williams. “We were trying to get him to wake up because I guess the hardest part is to get them to come out of this coma.
“He talked to him like he was a soldier. And he would be, like, ‘Sir, sir, I need you to open your eyes, sir.’ He started to respond to James. That’s the only one that he responded to.”
On Thanksgiving Day, Maj. Gen. Williams was taken off of a ventilator for the first time. He smiled from his hospital bed as he and his family posed for a photo through Zoom.
On Wednesday, his wife got a call that her husband was moved from the COVID-19 wing of the hospital and was free of COVID-19. She drove to Jacksonville and talked to her husband face to face for the first time in weeks.
“They said he’s a survival story of COVID. I always believed he would make it,” said Ryan Williams. “But to have him turn that corner is just an enormous, enormous blessing.”
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There’s still a long road ahead, according to Ryan Williams. Maj. Gen. Williams will now likely have to go to a long-term care facility to get physical therapy.