One Year Later

Johnny and Brenda Scearce have some memories no one would want when they talk about the last year of their lives.

Those memories are the ones filled with doctors, machines, tubes, medicines, hopelessness and death itself.

But they have a reason for wanting others to know what they went through. “It’s more than about COVID, it’s about the Lord...for people to understand what a miracle is,” Brenda said.

Last Wednesday afternoon, sitting together in a swing on their front porch, the Scearces relived their last year. But with every detail of bad news or a tragedy ahead came words of praise for answered prayers.

The Scearces’ war against COVID-19 and the vicious infections that followed began in August 2020.

Brenda said that was when Johnny was having some sinus trouble. At least that was what they thought.

But serious breathing difficulties soon began and Johnny was admitted to Fannin Regional Hospital in mid-September.

He was sent home a few days later, COVID-19 thought to be behind him.

Antibiotics and oxygen accompanied Johnny home, and about the time the

antibiotics ended the battle for life began that would see Johnny spend almost four months in a hospital bed.

Johnny had picked up a bacterial superinfection, basically viral pneumonia from COVID-19, and it attacked with a vengeance.

“He’s bad,” Brenda remembers Johnny’s brother, Mike, saying when he came to their house late one night after Brenda called.

Johnny was taken back to Fannin Regional and then transferred to CHI Memorial Hospital in Chattanooga the next day.

Brenda remembers vividly the first doctor that saw Johnny telling her, “he won’t make it.”

And the war to keep Johnny alive started.

Those words were followed with 94 days in CHI Memorial, 70 of those in the intensive care unit.

Dr. Jesse Tucker, CHI Memorial’s medical director of ECMO, described what was happening from the infection. “It got him sick again very quickly after his initial infection with COVID-19, and that pneumonia was so severe that it basically ate a hole in his lung,” Tucker said.

Additionally, when he was admitted to the Chattanooga hospital, Johnny was suffering from acute respiratory distress syndrome, which required a mechanical ventilator.

The ventilator was not enough to support his lungs, so Johnny was put on an extracorporeal membrane oxygenation machine (ECMO). His time on that machine was the longest the hospital has ever seen, Tucker said.

Kidney failure attacked next and Johnny was put on continuous dialysis.

Brenda remembers the three forms of life support. But she also remembers the 13 IVs and all the tubes that went with them and the machines.

She stood by as “massive amounts of fluid” were drawn off Johnny’s entire body regularly. Brenda remembers the bags on the cart to hold the fluid. “There were so many,” she says.

Then there was the floor Johnny was on, the floor filled with COVID-19 patients. It’s a place with sights and sounds Brenda will never forget.

She remembers leaving Johnny’s room one night and seeing a man chair, waiting to visit his loved one. Suddenly a woman came out of the room he was waiting to enter with the news their loved one had just died.

Brenda told how a nurse described the COVID-19 floor as a floor with continuous body bags. “People were dying all the time,” Brenda remembers.

“There was death all around,” Johnny says.

Almost from the time the Scearce's entered the Chattanooga hospital, Brenda cried, and she prayed, and she read her Bible. She can’t remember how many times she repeated all three.

She contacted everyone she knew and asked them to pray, and prayers started going up from everywhere.

But one by one, mountains would be placed in front of Johnny, and one by one those mountains would be moved.

Brenda would be told two more times Johnny was not going to make it. Three times she and the rest of the family were told he just needed to be made “comfortable.”

But one-day things began looking up. The miracles started.

Brenda had left Johnny’s room one night only to be called back in a rush because he had opened his eyes.

Another day Johnny told his son, Shawn, to “fix my covers.”  Johnny was supposed to “out of it,” in no way able to communicate, much less know what he might be saying, Brenda said.

Shawn flipped up the covers only to discover Johnny laying in a huge pool of blood. “They gave me two pints of blood that night,” Johnny said.

But the bleeding was stopped and another mountain moved. Johnny’s healing continued.

All along decisions were being made where the odds were against Johnny’s survival.

Medicines were tried, Brenda remembers, and they wouldn’t work. Doctors – Johnny had 16 of them – would say there were still stronger ones. But one by one they would fail. Then the doctors would order the last one, the strongest, and that would be the one that worked.

Then came time to disconnect the ECMO machine.

Johnny credits his niece, Stephanie, with saving his life.

As he had come off the ventilator, he was being awakened a little at a time, but not kept awake. He wasn’t improving.

Stephanie had called a hospital in Chicago, the best in the country with ECMO success, and talked to the head nurse. She was told, “You’ve got to wake him up,” when he comes off the machine.

Stephanie told Johnny’s doctors, in unwavering terms, about her conversation with the nurse in Chicago. The doctors listened.

“That saved my life,” Johnny said.

The prayers stayed strong and step by step, one battle at a time, Johnny was winning the war to live.

“I’d tell everybody to pray for another tube to come out...and they’d take it out,” Brenda said.

Then on Thursday, January 14, 2021, Johnny left CHI Memorial, headed for an acute rehabilitation facility outside Atlanta.

The halls at CHI Memorial were lined with doctors, nurses, and staff as Johnny was wheeled away.

Johnny remembers the faces. He tried to imagine what the people behind them felt. They had seen so much death, and “now they were seeing a miracle,” he said.

He and Brenda can’t say enough good things about the care and the people who provided it at CHI Memorial. “I don’t see how they do it,” Brenda said. “They were seeing all the death from COVID, yet they kept doing their jobs. That was a miracle in itself.”

Tucker credited “an enormous amount of dedication” from everyone at the hospital for “a very miraculous recovery.”

Johnny weighed 237 pounds when he got sick. That weight dropped down to 158 pounds with his body still holding fluid. Brenda guesses the real number would have been in the 140s.

But now Johnny is home. Every day he gets a little strong, walks a little farther, and does something else he couldn’t do when he came home from the hospital.

He says he’ll start working out again in a few weeks.  Before he got sick, he said that was his routine four days a week. Brenda says three.

Johnny is still recovering, battling a few aches, some stiffness, and working to get his lungs back in shape.

“He had the best lungs of the whole family,” Brenda said.

“I’ve always been a doubting Thomas when people would talk about miracles,” Brenda said. “I’d want to see it before I’d believe it.

“God showed me He still works miracles. Praise Him for them,” Brenda said.