The Beatles may have sung it, but this elderly couple proved it — all you need is love and anyone can be saved.
In an e-book published by Alexandra Hospital on Wednesday (July 27), a nurse clinician revealed the story of how an elderly woman who was gravely ill with Covid-19 had a miraculous recovery after she was allowed to see her husband.
The elderly couple, both in their sixties, was admitted to Alexandra Hospital and placed in different units at the end of last year, Darren Goh told Shin Min Daily News.
The wife’s condition worsened and she had to be relocated to an Intensive Care Unit (ICU), where she was separated from her family and her husband. However, the couple maintained contact through video calls.
“The times when we visited him, he was always sharing their stories, and how strong a woman she is,” Goh wrote in the e-book titled Missy Reflections II. The term ‘Missy’ is colloquially used to refer to nurses.
The woman managed to recover her vitality and was transferred to the same cubicle as her husband.
Added Goh: “They spoke and laughed like they were before, despite their conditions — a testament that love knows no disease.”
But tragedy struck and her lungs gave up on her, Goh recalled. Her health deteriorated to the point that she seemed worse off than before.
Before being placed on life support, the woman spoke with her family for hours. As the day progressed, however, her vigour plummeted.
Doctors permitted her family to see her in these precarious moments, even making an exception for the still-bedridden husband who was on oxygen support and allowing his bed to be placed beside hers.
“He immediately reached out and held her hand and he held like it was the first and last time that he would ever hold,” Goh recollected. “That moment broke everyone in the room and everyone felt the love they share.
“If we needed one memory to know what true love is, they were showing us.”
The husband stroked his wife’s hair and prayed for her, holding her all the way, even when her condition appeared incurable.
That day, Goh left work with a heavy heart. While he was glad that the husband was with the wife in final moments — or so he thought — he said that there was “so much heartbreak for him because she was slowly fading away.”
But a miracle occurred the next day, Goh said. The woman’s condition improved and she regained consciousness. Her blood pressure was also at “almost normal levels”.
Reminiscing the scene, Goh wrote: “We held our breath and looked at each other with the understanding that this was nothing comprehensible by medicine nor science. I asked the medical consultant jokingly, ‘What’s the medical diagnosis?’
“She looked at me and I said, ‘Love and prayers.'”
“That day, we witnessed a miracle in poetry,” Goh concluded. “A love story that touched the heavens.”
This article was first published on AsiaOne and republished on theAsianparent with permission.