Jon Coelho, 32, spent the past month in a hospital in Danbury, Connecticut, where doctors helped him fight the coronavirus. Sadly, he has become one of the 49,963 Americans who lost against it, dying of cardiac arrest brought on by the disease.
On Wednesday, his wife Katie, 33, went to the hospital and gathered Jon’s belongings. In the process, she opened his phone and tried to save as many pictures of him and their two children as she could. However, what she found on the device completely stunned her. Jon had left her and the kids a goodbye letter.
Image credits: Katie Coelho
Image credits: Journey for Braedyn
Image credits: Katie Coelho
Image credits: Katie Coelho
Jon and Katie met as students at Western Connecticut State University. They started out as close friends, but eventually became boyfriend and girlfriend, and tied the know in 2013. They had two children: Braedyn, 2 and a half, and Penelope, 10 months.
Katie and Jon had worked really hard to build their family. Katie told BuzzFeed News they had two miscarriages and went through IVF. Braedyn was born with severe neurological problems and the parents were told he had just six weeks to live.
As fate would have it, he survived. As Katie cared for him full-time, and Jon provided for the family working at a nearby courthouse.
Image credits: Katie Coelho
Jon’s friend Jacob Wycoff said Jon was a “devoted father” and “a bit of a romantic when it comes to Katie.”
He also was the sole provider for the family, and worked tirelessly to make sure Katie didn’t have to leave the house to take care of earning. “But when it was his time with the kids, he really, really enjoyed it,” Wycoff added.
Wycoff said he feels the most sadness for Jon’s kids. “They’re not going to grow up to know how amazing their dad was. And that really is sad to me, because he is — was — an amazing guy.”
Image credits: Katie Coelho
Because Braedyn is considered high risk for the coronavirus, the entire family had been taking quarantining very seriously. Katie and the kids stayed home, but Jon, an essential worker, still had to go to work.
“My husband wore gloves, masks, he washed his hands,” Katie explained. “He was so super vigilant because he was so afraid of what would happen to our son if he caught it.”
On March 24, however, Jon found out he’d been in contact with someone who’d tested positive for COVID-19. Even though Jon didn’t feel too bad — just fatigue, a migraine, and no sense of smell — he got tested, and the results came back positive, making the man quarantine himself in a separate part of the house.
“Within 24 hours, he started coughing, and with the coughing fits, he wouldn’t be able to catch his breath in between,” Katie said. “The doctor told him to go to the hospital because he’d probably need nebulizer treatments.”
Image credits: Katie Coelho
The first week the doctors tried treating him with medications, but Jon was still struggling and had to be intubated.
“I don’t know why I put my phone on vibrate that night, but I did,” Katie said. “And I slept through a 4 a.m. phone call from him that said his breathing got a little weird in the night, so they said they’re gonna have to let his body rest so he could come home to me and the kids, and that he loved us.”
Image credits: Katie Coelho
After Jon was put on the ventilator, the doctors still expected him to make a full recovery. But his condition soon became worse.
“They tried to wake him up on day seven, and he was breathing way, way, way too hard,” Katie said. “They thought he was having a panic attack, so they FaceTimed me, and he just said, ‘I love you and I’m sorry’, and then they had to re-intubate him.”
After that, Jon’s kidneys started failing, and he ran a high fever for days. The man had to be sedated because he would wake up delirious, panicked, and would try to get rid of his ventilator tubes.
“He especially became agitated after talking to us, because he’d try to talk over the ventilator, and it would cause too much stress and his breathing would get out of whack.”
As the weeks went by, Jon did show signs of improvement. Doctors started the gradual process of weaning him off the sedatives and began testing to see how well would he manage off the ventilator.
“They trialed him all day [Tuesday], and he did a really good job,” Katie recalled. |He would get nervous, but the nurses were able to talk him down, and he was responsive.|
Katie spoke to a doctor that night around 9 p.m., and the conversation made her hopeful.
“The doctor I’d spoken to said, ‘We’re going to be able to wake your husband up in two days,” she said. “And they started talking to me about recovery.”
But after a few hours Jon went into cardiac arrest and died.
A GoFundMe was started to support the family
Image credits: Katie Coelho
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