After nearly two months, an area woman finally came home Tuesday from the hospital where she nearly lost her life to the coronavirus.
Karla Taylor Bauman left Chicago’s Kindred Hospital on Tuesday, and she was able to see her family for an emotional, but socially distanced, homecoming party.
“Doctors pronounced me dead. My heart stopped,” she said. “My kidneys failed. My whole body just shut down, and yet here I am. To me, it’s a miracle.”
Bauman was on a ventilator for 15 days. For nearly a month, including her 50th birthday,s he was in a coma.
“Doctors said we had to let her go because her brain was dead,” Bauman’s stepfather Carlos Escalante said. “We kept the faith that a miracle could happen, and on the sixth day she started waking up.”
Her family says that her lungs have recovered, and that she doesn’t need help breathing.
For her husband Jevon, Tuesday was an emotional reminder of what he nearly lost.
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“I almost lost her,” he said, fighting back tears. “I still have her by the grace of God.”
While Bauman says that it took her nearly a week to figure out where she was, her recovery sinec then has been remarkable. She is back to speaking English and Spanish again, and she is on the road to recovery.
For now, her family has a simple message: don’t give up hope.
“Don’t lose your faith. Keep believing,” Escalante said. “Miracles happen. My stepdaughter is a miracle.”
Bauman and her husband, who was able to avoid getting coronavirus, plan to donate blood plasma, and are hopeful that their gesture can help to save a life, just like Bauman’s life was spared by the disease that nearly ended it.
