69-year-old woman with Covid wakes up from coma as family was picking out her gravestone

  • 27 Nov - 03 Dec, 2021
  • Mag The Weekly
  • Mag Files

As their 69-year-old mother spent 60 days on a ventilator with Covid-19 and doctors said that she wasn't going to make it, Andrew Lerman and his family was preparing for her death. They had started picking out a gravestone, planning what she would wear for the funeral, cancelled her lease and donated her belongings, when suddenly, Bettina Lerman woke up. "They told us, 'Your mother is never going to wake up,'" Andrew told The Washington Post. "It was the end of the line." But on Oct. 29, they were planning to take Bettina off life support when a doctor at her hospital in Portland, Maine, called Andrew. Bettina was unvaccinated and had multiple preexisting conditions, including diabetes, and had recently undergone a quadruple-bypass surgery, which made her Covid-19 illness more severe. She lives in Florida but had been up in Maine and while she was there all of them contracted Covid-19. Andrew is also unvaccinated, and said the virus was "brutal" for him, while his father recovered quickly. But Bettina had the worst illness of the three. Doctors said that Bettina's lungs "were destroyed" and "thought there was no chance of survival at that point," Andrew said. But she's now out of the intensive care unit and slowly improving, though she still needs some oxygen support.

RELATED POST

COMMENTS