‘Tell them I love them’: KS nurse urges masks after surviving COVID-19 hospitalization
Stacy Kimuyu, a 50-year-old nurse from Great Bend, said her rural Kansas town adopted a culture that politicized the coronavirus pandemic — it even influenced her own lackadaisical approach to wearing a mask. But then she contracted COVID-19, and her attitude shifted drastically.
Kimuyu spoke during the University of Kansas Health System’s daily briefing Wednesday and said that, before contracting the virus, she believed masks worked but she didn’t consistently wear them.
However, since needing to be airlifted to a hospital in Hays, Kansas, and suffering through the virus, Kimuyu is urging Kansans to wear masks and practice proper hygiene.
“I think it’s just that it’s not going to happen to us kind of thing,” Kimuyu said.
Kimuyu is one of at least 190,018 people in the state of Kansas to test positive for COVID-19. Barton County, where she is from has had 1,935 cases since March. The virus has spread rapidly across the state killing 2,109 people. Rural areas which avoided early impacts from the virus experienced major outbreaks this fall, having refused to enforce recommended mask mandates.
After initially opting out of Gov. Laura Kelly’s first mask mandate many of those counties, including Barton County, have since adopted Gov. Laura Kelly’s new statewide mask order.
On October 31 Kimuyu began running a fever and had body aches. By Nov. 6 she struggled to breathe on her own, so she went to the local hospital. Five days later, on Nov. 11 her respiratory therapist told her she needed to be airlifted to the University of Kansas Health System hospital in Hays and placed on a ventilator.
The respiratory therapist, she said, warned her that everything would start moving fast from that point forward.
“I knew we were in serious trouble and I just surrendered and knew that whatever it was going to take I was going to do,” Kimuyu said. She handed her phone to the respiratory therapist and asked her to text her family to “let them know what’s going on and tell them I love them.”
After four days on a ventilator, which are often reserved for only the most severe case, Kimuyu was strong enough to be removed from the device helping sustain her breathing. She spent another four days recovering in the hospital. By Wednesday she had few remaining symptoms but took the life-threatening experience to heart.
Starting in her own home, Kimuyu said, she now preaches the importance of mask wearing and personal hygiene. She explains to her children and grandchildren that the behaviors are about respect and keeping others safe.
“Wearing that mask it’s just respecting other people and how awful I would feel if I exposed someone that didn’t make it,” Kimuyu said. “You can pass this thing without having any symptoms.”
In Great Bend, Kimuyu said, she’s seen a shift as people have begun to take the virus more seriously. When she went into the hospital she said, there had only been three deaths in the town. Now there are more than 20.
“It just wasn’t real to us and now it’s become real,” Kimuyu said.
This story was originally published December 16, 2020 at 1:54 PM.
