The most important aspect of the event will be that they are both alive and together.
The couple was separated for 45 days earlier this year while fighting the coronavirus. Charlunda spent 29 days in Beaumont Hospital, Dearborn where the couple went to be evaluated for the disease in March. She was admitted immediately and spent 16 days on a ventilator, while David was initially sent home, but later rushed as an emergency to Beaumont Hospital Wayne where doctors determined that his body was shutting down.
His sister, a doctor, advised him to use all his remaining strength to sit up on the side of his hospital bed and continue to talk to her, often for a continuous seven hours at a time, making breathing easier for him.
Thompson said the difficulty of the disease is often underrated and that his the physical strain actually made him want to weep.
“I thought, if I go to sleep, I won't wake back up,” the middle school teacher said. “So I was determined not to go to sleep.”
His wife, a hospice care nurse, said that for her, the most difficult part of the situation was not knowing what her husband's condition might be or if he was OK. She said that waking up in the ICU was very difficult with no family around.
“I didn't know if I would see him again,” she said.
The pair were reunited earlier this month, seeing each other for the first time in 45 days at the Mary Free Bed Rehabilitation Center.
The muscles in Charlunda's upper legs were so weakened by the COVID-19 virus, she needed extensive therapy and rehabilitation to learn to walk again, a result of the wasting effects of the disease on patients' bodies.
The couple is together again, now, in their Inkster home, and looking forward to a very special anniversary celebration next month.
