Her father-in-law brought home COVID-19 and died. Now KCK woman fights for her life
When Janis Brewster learned her father-in-law planned to come home from the nursing home in early April, she hurried to get his house ready.
She cleaned rooms and scrubbed floors. With the help of her husband, she rearranged furniture. All for Steve’s dad, the 88-year-old who had spent the past two months at Riverbend Post Acute Rehabilitation getting therapy after a fall in early February.
“It was Janis’s idea, ‘Let’s make this house perfect for dad coming home,’” Steve Brewster said. “She was a fireball.”
Five days before Carl Brewster was supposed to return, he called and said Riverbend — in the early days of a coronavirus outbreak that would infect staff and eventually nearly every resident, killing 30 of them — was sending him home early. Make sure the door’s unlocked, he told his son and daughter-in-law.
After a mishap with Carl’s transportation, Steve and Janis Brewster went out that cold April 3 night to pick him up. Together, the three drove back to his Kansas City, Kansas, home.
That ride, Steve said, with his dad coughing the whole way, would change everything.
Carl Brewster, a Korean War veteran and third generation railroad man, has been gone three weeks. He died April 5, sitting in his wheelchair in his kitchen. Four days later, after a post-mortem test, Carl’s family was told he was positive for the coronavirus.
Now Janis, 68, is in a medically induced coma inside Providence Medical Center. She’s been on a ventilator for a week, her husband of 48 years unable to see or talk to her. He and their two children and four grandchildren must rely on two calls a day to the hospital to see if there’s been any change.
“I just feel like I’m in the worst nightmare of my life,” said Steve Brewster, also 68, and a retired railroad man like his father. “It’s my best friend, my closest person in my life. I feel like I’m only half here — it’s hard to sleep, hard to do anything because I’m so worried.”
The Brewsters’ story — Steve says his father wasn’t tested for the coronavirus before he was released from Riverbend, and came home only to infect his family — was featured in the Star on Easter Sunday.
Since Carl’s death, the disbelief has overwhelmed the family. And with Janis so sick, Steve can’t help but think that none of this should have happened.
“They should have tested him,” Steve said. “They should have kept him there.”
When the couple found out on April 9 that Carl had died of COVID-19, their family physician told them to get tested. Two days later, the day before Easter, the Brewsters were told they each tested positive.
That April 11 day, Janis Brewster had a nagging cough and body aches. Those aches, she told The Star then, were extreme. Unlike any she’d ever had.
But she was upbeat that Saturday, thankful for the moments at the window that morning when she could watch her grandchildren have an Easter egg hunt and play basketball.
Steve’s symptoms have never been severe. He had a “99-something” fever for awhile and fatigue. But nothing even remotely close to what his wife has gone through.
“Janis took the brunt of the whole thing,” Steve said. “It’s very sad for me. There’s some guilt there too.
“It’s my dad I brought home. ... Janis went with me. And she gets sick and I really don’t.”
‘Coughing his head off’
The day after The Star’s first story ran, Riverbend administrators mentioned it in the daily update shared with media and on its Facebook page. The director never responded to questions from a reporter before publication.
Executive director Cory Schulte and director of nursing Maureen Purvis expressed their “disappointment in what appears to be a continued negative narrative regarding our Facility. We also wish to note that we will be reaching out directly to the family of the resident quoted in the article, and make ourselves available to answer any questions and address any concerns they may have.”
Schulte did call the Brewsters. Steve said Janis — who had begun to have breathing issues at that point — was sitting with him that Monday after Easter and heard the entire conversation.
With several staffers on the conference call with him, Schulte expressed his condolences about his father’s death.
Brewster said he asked the director, “Why did you release him? He was coughing his head off on the way home.”
Schulte, according to Steve Brewster, said that the 88-year-old was asymptomatic when he left Riverbend. Staffers agreed: “We never heard a cough.”
Nearly every day during the two months Carl Brewster was in the facility, he spoke to his son by phone. Steve Brewster said he sometimes jotted down notes from these calls on a calendar. On March 30, Steve wrote: “Dad’s coughing.”
But Schulte told Steve that he knew his dad was feeling OK, because he said he was in his room while he ate breakfast that morning that Carl went home.
“He said he was fine,” Steve Brewster said Schulte told him. “He didn’t seem weak.”
Brewster said that on the way home he heard his father’s cough and asked him if he had been tested at Riverbend.
Carl Brewster said because he didn’t have a fever, they didn’t test him.
Schulte did not respond to a request for comment for this story. Last week, after a different family filed a lawsuit against the facility, he told The Star in an email: “Due to the recent public discussion of potential litigation against Riverbend, I think it prudent for me to discontinue responding to media requests.”
Message to the nurse
One week later, Janis was admitted to the hospital. For many days she had been running a 103-degree temperature and only got out of bed to go to the bathroom.
At 2:30 that next morning, on April 21, Steve Brewster got a call from Providence. He remembers what the nurse said to him.
“Do you want to resuscitate your wife?” she asked him.
The nurse told him that Janis’s oxygen was low and she might have a hard time making it through the night.
The nurse told Steve that they asked Janis if she wanted to be resuscitated.
“She said, ‘No,’” the nurse told Steve. “She said, ‘Let me die.’”
The nurse called the Brewsters’ long-time family physician, who said she needed to call Steve.
He knew his wife had pneumonia in both lungs. That’s what the doctor had told him just hours before. She was in the Intensive care unit, hooked up to an IV for hydration.
And she had been given antibiotics to treat the pneumonia. What concerned Steve was that their doctor told him that “it’s presenting as heart failure.” Janis has never had heart issues.
Doctors have told Steve that they can’t test her heart until she no longer has the coronavirus.
Steve’s message to the nurse in the middle of the night was urgent:
“Anything you can do to save my wife’s life, do it.”
Updates and faith
When her mom first was admitted to Providence, on April 20, Emerald Given asked her friends on Facebook for prayers.
Since then, she’s updated her mom’s condition several times. And the support from people who love her mom and know her family has helped get her through what’s been “one of the most difficult times in my life,” said Given, who lives on the same street as her parents.
“It was heartbreaking when my Grandpa passed away and I could not be with my parents because they were possibly exposed to Covid-19,” she said. “I just wanted to hug them and grieve for my Grandpa with them, but because of the situation, I could not.”
Now, with her mom in the ICU fighting the same virus, she can’t be with her again.
On April 22, Given put an update on Facebook that her mom was in stable condition. And the following day, she said, her mom would begin convalescent plasma treatment, which allows people suffering from severe coronavirus to receive plasma from those who have recovered from it
The hope is that the antibodies in the donated plasma — called “convalescent plasma” — will boost the ability of extremely ill patients to fight off the virus and recover faster.
After the procedure Thursday, Given wrote on Facebook:
“My Mom had the plasma treatment today. She is doing about the same, but her kidneys aren’t functioning.”
The nurse, Given said, had indicated that her mom was able to tolerate all of the treatment so far.
“And that it is hopeful that she is even strong enough for the kidney treatment. ... Thank you all for your continued prayers and support.”
On Saturday, the best news came. Janis’s temperature was down.
“Her fever has been at 103 since the 12th,” Steve Brewster said.
And on Sunday, it was normal.
Could the plasma treatment be working?
“It’s about the best hope a person has that is pretty ill with this virus,” Brewster said. “They explained to me, this isn’t something they are going to give to her and by tomorrow morning she’s going to be all better.
“It’s a slow process because those antibodies are going to be fighting off the virus. So she could turn around.”
It’s a good sign, Steve said the doctors told him, that her fever is going down.
‘It’s like they think that’s being successful.”
What if he had waited?
Steve Brewster is working with attorneys from Smith Mohlman in Kansas City. He says he’s concerned that other residents of nursing homes may not have been tested before being released.
He still doesn’t understand why the nursing facility didn’t test everyone. Especially those who they knew were going to leave and go home or go somewhere else.
Also, said Rachel Smith, Brewster’s attorney, Janis and Steve are in a vulnerable population. Both are in their late 60s and have diabetes. Janis also has auto-immune diseases.
“They brought COVID into the (nursing) home and sent it back out into the community,” Smith said. “Which I think is unforgivable.”
Steve doesn’t understand why Riverbend administrators have handled this whole situation the way they have.
“Why didn’t (the executive director) say, ‘We’re sorry your dad died. We should have tested him,” Brewster said.
A part of him is angry, Brewster said, but “I’m so devastated, I can’t be mad and sad at the same time. The sadness is the stronger emotion at this point, especially with what’s happened to my wife.”
Given talks to her dad at least three times a day. It’s hard, she said, to watch him have to go through what’s happened since April 3. Especially now, with her mom in the ICU.
“The love they have for each other is one of the most beautiful things I have ever seen,” she said. “I am praying that soon, we can all be together again.”
When Given called the hospital Tuesday morning for an update, she was told that her mom’s fever had gone up again. The family continues to pray.
And Brewster tells his story as a warning to others.
“If you think a person could be from a nursing home, there’s the slightest risk, have them tested. Don’t do this. Don’t bring a sick person in your home.”
He wonders what if he would have waited, insisted that his dad stay at Riverbend until the next week when he was supposed to come home.
“Just think what I would have avoided. By then, maybe they would have figured out he was positive.”
His questions for Riverbend continue to mount
“Was it the cost of the test? “ Brewster said. “Was it you were afraid Dad was going to die in your facility? What was the reasoning why you didn’t test any person they were going to send back into the general public?
“Don’t let them out to come home. I just can’t fathom it.”
This story was originally published April 28, 2020 at 2:05 PM.
