That day in March, Dr Julie John found it difficult to breathe. Her daughter, eight years old, was sleeping near her. Her six-year-old son was also nearby. She didn’t call 911, as people normally do for emergencies in the United States. She got down on her knees, put her forehead on the ground and prayed. She prayed for time to say goodbye to her children in the form of a video.
Julie, who tested positive for coronavirus, made the video for her children, to be shown to them five years later. But fortunately she got better in the days to come.
Two weeks later, when she felt a lot better, Dr Julie, an intensive care specialist at a New Jersey hospital, appeared on CNN and, in a quivering voice, recounted her experience.
Julie John was born in Kerala to Malayali parents – her father is from Puthussery in Thiruvalla and mother from Mallappally in Pathanamthitta. Julie moved to the US when she was two years old and grew up to become a doctor while remaining a devout believer.
In an interview to TNM, she says how for some reason she thought that there was no way she could contract coronavirus. “My symptoms started two days after a week of work ended. I attributed some of it to a long week of working with very sick patients. But then the fever and headache started to become a lot worse and one day I started to have severe shortness of breath. I felt like I was drowning in my lungs. It kept getting worse throughout the whole day. I didn’t tell my parents, I didn’t even tell any of my physician colleagues (at first). I was scared,” she recalls.
Gradually her breathing began to improve and her saturation on the pulse oximeter rose to 90% at which point she made the video for her children. “I thought there was a chance that I might die if the shortness of breath got worse. I made the video so that my children could get it in five years. That’s when my youngest would be 11 and my oldest, 13,” she says.
Julie felt that was the appropriate age they should see the video. She wanted to send the video to let them know how much she loves them. In the video, she asked them to treat the world “really great because it has treated us great so far”.
She also told them to be kind and nice, and that she loved them more than anything else in the world, more than her job.
This is a message Julie repeats through the interview. Her family is the ‘most important thing in the world’, she says, adding that if she had to choose between them and the job, she’d easily pick them. She made the video because she didn’t want to leave the world as “the hero doc but as the mom who loved them more than anything”.
She has been in quarantine since, and undergoing treatment. Three weeks later, she regained enough strength, Julie says.
There have been good and bad days and days when she wondered if she’d ever feel 100% back to normal but she is feeling a lot better now.
Julie has not yet tested negative. “In the US it’s extremely difficult to get tested. Even when I got tested (the first time), it took almost a week for the results to come back. I hope to get tested to see if I’m negative and then I can donate my plasma to save another coronavirus patient’s life,” she says.