😷 COVID miracle: At the pandemic's 5-year anniversary, it's time to tell the story 🔌
By Bobby Ross Jr.
ATOKA, Okla. — To my brother-in-law Tod Dillard, COVID-19 was no big deal.
Until it nearly killed him.
After getting infected, the Air Force veteran and longtime law enforcement officer spent 115 days in the hospital. At one point, his condition became so dire that his adult children, Bryce and BreAnne, tearfully told their unconscious father goodbye via a phone stuck to his ear.
As Tod’s prognosis improved, he had to rebuild his muscles and stamina just to attempt basic movements. Only then could he relearn how to walk, shower and feed himself.
But I’m jumping way ahead. Let’s start at the beginning.
“I wasn’t really concerned about it,” Tod said of the coronavirus, telling his personal story — his miraculous story, as our family sees it — for the first time at the pandemic’s five-year anniversary.
The U.S. government declared the “very contagious” virus — as President Donald Trump described it — a national emergency on March 13, 2020.
COVID-19 brought a widespread lockdown that closed schools, stores and sanctuaries. Millions around the world died as fierce debates erupted over masks, vaccines and the disease’s origins.
A year into the pandemic, my wife, Tamie, who battles autoimmune diseases, and I joyfully welcomed the arrival of vaccines developed by companies such as Pfizer, Moderna and Johnson & Johnson.
“The vaccines offer hope for ending the pandemic,” I wrote in March 2021. “They offer hope for a brighter tomorrow. They offer hope, in a very real sense, for my own family and friends.”
But not all our loved ones shared our COVID-19 anxiety.
“Everybody that we knew, all it would do to them — they’d test positive for it, but they’d just lose their smell and taste,” recalled Tod, Tamie’s older brother. “That’s why I was joking around and calling it a government hoax.”
Tod, now 59, pegged 1993 as the last time he got a flu shot. The injection made him ill, he said, and he saw no need to repeat that unpleasant experience.
“I was afraid I’d get sick if I took it,” Tod, who has diabetes, said of a possible COVID-19 vaccination. “I didn’t think anything about it really.”
“That’s how we both felt,” agreed his wife, Tracie, who works with him at the Howard McLeod Correctional Center in Atoka, about 130 miles southeast of Oklahoma City.
For the Dillards, the state-run prison has become sort of the family business: Bryce, 33, and BreAnne, 32, also work with their dad and stepmother at the McLeod facility, along with Bryce’s wife, Brittany.
BreAnne started her job at the correctional center in 2021 and lacked paid time off when she got sick in September that year. Tod helped administer COVID-19 tests at the prison and gave his daughter one. She tested positive.
The illness soon spread to Tod and Tracie.
“It felt like any other sinus infection,” he said.
But within a week, his condition worsened. So did Tracie’s.
Late on a Sunday night, breathing became so difficult for Tod that he asked Tracie to take him to the Atoka County Medical Center emergency room.
“Honey, I’m going to have to call an ambulance because I’m sick, too,” she replied. “I don’t feel comfortable driving you.”
That Monday — Sept. 13, 2021 — marked eight years since Tod and Tamie’s mother, Patricia Sue Dooley Dillard, died from a sudden heart attack.
Tamie planned to call Tod — as she always does on the anniversary — after her brother got home from work. Instead, her sister-in-law’s caller ID flashed on my wife’s iPhone.
Tracie explained that Tod was hospitalized with COVID-19 and would be flown by medical helicopter to an intensive care unit at Mercy Hospital in Joplin, Missouri, about 225 miles from Atoka, because his condition was critical.
After refusing a catheter, Tod had gotten up to use the restroom at the Atoka hospital without calling for help. He fell, and the resulting gash on his head required stitches. A CT scan delayed his departure to Joplin.
Tod arrived at Mercy in the wee hours of Tuesday morning. By Wednesday, Tracie’s oxygen level fell so low that she, too, required hospitalization in Atoka.
By late Thursday, Tod had deteriorated to the point that his doctors did not expect him to survive the weekend. They needed to know his end-of-life wishes, they said.
A nurse named Brenda noted Tod’s grim condition on his medical chart. Brenda wrote on Friday that she had talked to Tamie — whom Tracie had asked to serve as next of kin — and explained the “expected cascade of events to play out over the coming days.”
Brenda also indicated that she had queried Tamie concerning Tod’s preference on a possible do-not-resuscitate order if his heart or breathing were to stop.
“Sister stated that she had this discussion with him … when their mother passed and she knew he would not want aggressive measures to be taken especially in the event his way of life would be halted,” the nurse wrote.
Tamie worked behind the scenes to make sure she had loved ones available specifically to support and comfort Tod’s immediate family if the worst happened.
She connected with Tracie’s parents in Pennsylvania, Bob and Pat (the same names as my wife’s own parents); with Pete Wade, a close friend of her father, Bob Dillard, who lives next door in Eagletown, Oklahoma; and with Tonya Chandler, Bryce and BreAnne’s mother, in Boswell, Oklahoma.
Tamie helped arrange a video call for late Friday afternoon so that Tod’s children could say goodbye to their father.
That call ended almost as quickly as it began.
Tod’s head was bruised and cut from the fall and swollen like a misshapen balloon from the oxygen being pumped into his body. Add to that his breathing tube and wires from his IV and pain medications, and he did not look anything like himself.
Seated at a counter at her mother’s home, BreAnne tumbled off her stool when she saw her father’s ghastly image on the screen.
“Turn it off!” Bryce screamed as his sister became inconsolable.
Minutes later, an audio call was initiated.
The siblings took turns speaking to their father — praying that he somehow could hear them.
“Even me having to tell him bye on the phone didn’t seem real,” BreAnne said. “In my heart, I knew that wasn’t going to happen.”
Friday night, my wife tried — without much success — to rest for a few hours.
“I just couldn’t sleep at all, thinking that any moment the phone’s going to ring, and it’s going to be his doctor telling me that he’s gone,” she recalled, reminding me of what I witnessed up close that weekend.
She thanked God for every hour that the phone didn’t ring, she’d later tell her brother.
On Facebook that Saturday, BreAnne expressed faith that her “super hero” would make it: “God has his plan with him. I just don’t think he’s done with us. He has a lot to do and a lot of people to love! And I believe that. Please pray for our whole family.”
By Sunday — a week after the ambulance picked up Tod — the call Tamie feared still hadn’t come.
Hope crept in.
“Tod is working hard, he’s fighting hard, and it’s making all the difference right now,” Tamie wrote on Facebook. “His condition is still extremely critical, but no new infections, complications or backward progress has caused the scales to tip (the) balance in the wrong direction. The doctors are surprised in a good way and we’re pretty proud of Tod for showing off.”
Tod’s long road to recovery was just beginning — but he would win the fight.
After over a month in Joplin, he transferred in late October 2021 to Select Specialty Hospital in Tulsa, Oklahoma. There, he learned to use his muscles again — processes as simple as flexing his fingers and making a fist.
Tracie stayed two and a half weeks in the Atoka hospital. Her overall recovery lasted a few months.
While recuperating at home, she begged a doctor for a portable oxygen tank so she could go to Tulsa and be with Tod after weeks apart. After securing one, she made the drive and slept in a nearby hospitality house, spending her days in his room helping care for him.
After nearly a month in Tulsa, Tod returned home to the Atoka hospital a week before Thanksgiving to focus on his rehabilitation.
Nurses who remembered him as a patient couldn’t hide their astonishment at seeing him alive.
“They weren’t just saying that,” Tod said. “I could tell they were genuinely surprised.”
A major milestone came in December when Tod took his first steps in months.
He sent Tamie a video of that.
“I just sat down and bawled,” she said. “I must have watched it 400 times. And he was so excited to send me that video because he knew how hard it was going to hit me.”
A month later — in January 2022 — he rolled through the hospital in a wheelchair, greeted by a long line of medical staff holding balloons and signs with messages such as “You did it Tod!! #beatcovid.”
“I told everybody I was going to walk out of here,” he quipped as he stood up, receiving cheers and hugs as he finally headed home.
For Tod’s family — this writer included — tears flow easily when reflecting on his COVID-19 experience.
“I’m grateful and happy that he made it through all that,” Bryce said. “I’m impressed by everything he did going through all that. It’s inspiring.”
Said BreAnne: “He’s a blessing. Sometimes it leaves me speechless, really, to go to his office and have chats like we used to.”
Even as the outlook for Tod brightened, doctors kept tamping down expectations.
He might not regain all his physical strength, the family was told. His mental capacity might be diminished. He might need to quit his job.
But in March 2022, Tod resumed his former role as the prison’s administrative programs officer.
“He’s just defied all of those expectations,” Tamie said. “He’s back on his original retirement date, and he and Tracie are hopefully going to be able to do all the things they planned — and take all the trips they want to do. It’s just another aspect of the miracle that’s happened.”
For Tod and Tracie, life isn’t exactly back to normal.
It’s even better.
“I know I learned to appreciate him more,” Tracie said, “and things that I used to get uptight about just seem very insignificant. I hope he knows how much I love him.”
Since his COVID-19 experience, Tod has experienced survivor’s guilt, not understanding how or why he lived while so many did not. But he believes God has a plan for him. He wants to make his life count — especially after the second chance he received.
My brother-in-law was raised in a family of faith but had drifted away from church. His brush with death inspired Tod and Tracie to rekindle their connection with fellow Christians.
“I’ve just been trying to lead the life that I should have been leading all the time,” said Tod, who attends the Farris Church of Christ, a rural congregation southeast of Atoka. “I’ve always thought I was a good person, but I’m more conscientious.”
Seeing Tod back at work and back at church is “absolutely amazing,” said Jill Griffin, a former nurse manager at the prison and a member of the Farris church.
“It’s a God thing,” she said after a recent Sunday assembly.
That’s exactly how Tracie sees it.
Recalling that fateful weekend when everyone thought Tod was going to die — and he didn’t — his wife can’t help but cite divine intervention.
“That was God’s hand reaching down from heaven, saying, ‘You’re not leaving yet. I don’t want you up here.’”
Keep reading
The top section went a bit long this week, and Substack is telling me to shush being I’m nearing the email length limit. So please click here to read the Inside the Godbeat (Trump and AP style) and Final Plug (Christianity Today and USAID) sections of this week’s column.
Bobby Ross Jr. writes the Weekend Plug-in column for Religion Unplugged and serves as editor-in-chief of The Christian Chronicle. A former religion writer for The Associated Press and The Oklahoman, Ross has reported from all 50 states and 18 nations. He has covered religion since 1999.