‘Do it’: Kansas couple urges vaccination after pregnant wife hospitalized with COVID
Thomas and Holly Ekeler tried for years to have a baby. Finally, in 2021, they found out they were expecting. Then they both contracted COVID-19. Neither were vaccinated.
Thomas Ekeler, 37, said his symptoms were mostly mild. But his wife of five years was hospitalized 25 weeks into her pregnancy. She was eventually put on a ventilator at a hospital in Wichita, where they live.
The couple told their story this week on a University of Kansas Health System COVID-19 briefing, urging others to get vaccinated.
They recalled how doctors prepared to deliver their baby early, though at the time they were told the child would have little chance of survival.
At one point, Thomas Ekeler took a selfie with his wife in the hospital. He was unsmiling, in a mask. Her eyes were closed. In the moment, he worried it might be the last photo he took with her.
As Holly Ekeler’s conditions worsened, she was taken by Life Flight to the University of Kansas Health System.
After Thomas Ekeler feared he would lose both his wife and unborn son, Holly Ekeler started to improve. Seven days after being on a ventilator, she was able to come home.
Both have since been vaccinated. Holly Ekeler got hers before leaving the hospital.
“You don’t want to go through this,” Holly Ekeler said in a conversation with Dr. Steve Stites, chief medical officer at the University of Kansas Health System, during the briefing. “It was an awful experience and I’m lucky to be alive.”
Stites said the rate of serious hospitalization and death is much higher in pregnant women than the general population. He encouraged pregnant women to get the vaccination if they haven’t already.
Couple urges others to get vaccinated
The Ekelers, whose son is due in early 2022, are now encouraging others to get vaccinated. Though Holly Ekeler is out of the hospital, they’ve been told complications from her COVID-19 diagnosis may lead to a premature birth.
Their decision not to get the vaccine when it first became available was similar to many other people’s, they said during the KU briefing.
At first, Thomas Ekeler said, he felt like the vaccine had been rushed, and like the pandemic was being “over-exaggerated.”
Holly Ekeler shared many of her husband’s concerns.
“I didn’t know which way to go or what to believe,” she said.
Since that time, Thomas Ekeler has seen the inside of hospitals’ COVID units and the inside of labor and delivery units where some mothers infected with COVID-19 were fighting for their lives.
“Do it, do anything to save your loved ones,” Thomas Ekeler said of the vaccine.
Within a day or two of his wife getting put on the ventilator, Thomas Ekeler said many of their family members went out and got vaccinated.
As of this week, about 95% of those hospitalized with the coronavirus are unvaccinated, Stites said. And the percentage of unvaccinated people in the ICU with COVID-19 is closer to 98 or 99%.
“Nobody can question the efficacy of vaccination, nor the safety of it any longer,” he said.
Since the pandemic began, nearly 550,000 Kansans have contracted the virus, more than 17,000 have been hospitalized and 7,059 have died, according to the Kansas Department of Health and Environment.
This story was originally published January 6, 2022 at 9:05 AM.
