A 90-year-old woman from Washington state is praising God, her family, and her homemade potato soup for helping her overcome the coronavirus.
“I beat the coronavirus,” Geneva Wood, of Kirkland, Washington, told Good Morning America. “I have a lot to live for, and God gave me the strength to do it.”
Wood, a mother of five, lives independently in an apartment. But she spent the first few months of 2020 recovering from a stroke in a nursing home called Life Care Center, the facility responsible for the epicenter of the U.S. coronavirus outbreak.
Just days before she was ready to be discharged from the nursing home, she fell and broke her hip on March 4. Two days later, she contracted the coronavirus, according to one of her daughters, Cami Neidigh.
“With her stroke, she lost all ability to take care of herself and at Life Care Center they taught her how to live again,” Neidigh told GMA. “And then we got that [COVID-19] news and we were like, ‘Are you kidding me?’”
Neidigh said she and her siblings got a call at one point from their mother’s doctors that she may only have 24 hours to live. The family rushed to see her, but could only see her through a window because of safety precautions.
“At that time, we were one of the lucky families who could suit up and go in one-by-one and hold her hand, but not hug her, and she could talk to us,” Neidigh said. “She was telling us her goodbyes on the 10th and the next day, on the 11th, the rules changed and she was in total isolation.”
The family continued to see Wood from a distance as she was transported to a local hospital, where she was placed in isolation.
Neidigh and her siblings brought Wood’s homemade potato soup to the hospital that the hospital stored in a refrigerator. A nurse would tell the family that Wood was requesting the soup and that they would bring some to her hospital room door.
“She had gone about a week without eating and once we were able to get her some soup and once she was able to see us through the window, she really rallied,” said Neidigh. “It’s her comfort food.”
Last week, Neidigh and her brothers and sister got the news that their mother was clear of the coronavirus.
“They called, said we could come up and give her a hug,” said Neidigh. “She gave me the longest, hardest hug that I’ve ever had in my life.”
Wood could not return to a nursing home because of her brush with the coronavirus, so her children are all pitching in to give her round-the-clock care at home. She has a bit of a cough due to the residual lung damage but is otherwise on the path to recovery.
The state of Washington has a total of 3,723 confirmed cases of the coronavirus and 175 reported deaths from the illness, although it is unclear how many people have recovered from the coronavirus.