September 7, 2021

From the Los Angeles Times

Near-death experience … advise others to get vaccinated

In July, Jonathan Weltsch, 43, of Humboldt County, experienced fatigue while driving, but he didn’t suspect it had anything to do with COVID-19. He went on a job for his fence-making business, thinking he could finish the task quickly, despite not feeling his best.

He ended up passing out.

“It was a 15-minute job. I was just changing a battery,” Weltsch, a father of nine, told The Times. “I laid down on the ground next to the guy’s driveway to undo the cover on the gate. And I woke up two hours later. I guess I was just so out of oxygen, I couldn’t even stay awake.”

His wife, Sarah, insisted he get medical treatment. On July 8, Jonathan went to Providence St. Joseph Hospital in Eureka, where he tested positive for the coronavirus.

“I went to the ER, which was the worst experience of my life,” Weltsch said. “I lay on the floor because I couldn’t sit up. I was so tired, and the security guard kept [saying], ‘Sir, you can’t be on the floor. You need to sit up.’”

He eventually made it into a bed and endured an 18-day hospital stay that would push him to the brink of death. Weltsch said he had to wear a mask that supplied oxygen because breathing was impossible.

“You try to take it off; you can’t. You’re, like, gasping for air. … It’s basically like somebody is just suffocating you. You feel like you should be able to breathe, but nothing happens,” he said. “It’s basically like drowning.”

A breathing device was inserted into his nasal cavity.

“It felt like they were rubbing my brain or the back of my eyes or something, and it caused my nose to bleed, whatever they did in there. And for the first week, I had a bloody nose,” Weltsch said.

Everybody in the family — aside from the 19-year-old, who had moved out of the house — ended up contracting COVID-19. “We wish we’d been vaccinated, because the people that were vaccinated that got the variant did not get as sick as we did,” Sarah Weltsch said. But nobody was hit with a case as severe as Jonathan’s. The hospital told his wife to get his affairs in order.

“There were four days he was in that ICU unit, and they told me he may not get better, and he may not make it through this,” Sarah said. “I was already trying to recover at home, and I was really, really sick. And I was having panic attacks because I couldn’t breathe. I’ve got eight kids at home that I’m trying to take care of, and the youngest was still under 2 months old… It was not a fun place to be. Then, I’m being told my husband is gonna die. It was definitely a dark place.”

The experience has completely changed Jonathan. He used to tell people not to get vaccinated, after reading false claims on social media that the side effects from the shots were worse than contracting COVID-19. Now, he has been using his near-death experience to advise others to get vaccinated, appearing in a local paper and a public service announcement that’s airing on seven radio and two television stations. He plans on getting his vaccination once he’s past the 90-day period his doctor told him he has to wait.

“That’s a hell you don’t want to live,” Weltsch said of his bout with COVID-19.

He encourages people to get vaccinated because “anything’s better than being on a breathing machine and having leather for lungs and barely moving. That was just definitely the worst.”

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