Yes, Connie Kellogg is worried. But it is not particularly serious.

Her husband is a veteran and was a strong athlete when he was young. And now, at the age of 80, he still seems strong to her. He did a lot of daily activities the day before, including a long walk with the couple’s Airedale.

But JP Furch lost his spleen during a long struggle with non-Hodgkin's lymphoma three years ago, and his immune function was severely damaged.

Therefore, in this era of deadly coronavirus, Kellogg and Foggy remain vigilant.

They received the first dose of vaccine in February and a booster shot in July.

Despite this, they still prohibit unvaccinated people from leaving their home in rural Sevastopol and never enter public places without wearing a mask.

When Fitch woke up on September 11 and complained of physical discomfort, Kellogg, a licensed therapist with a doctorate, paid close attention to him and his symptoms.

When his fever reached 100 degrees and he looked more and more distressed later in the evening, she asked her daughter Wendy to call an ambulance.

When her husband was taken to an ambulance, Kellogg asked the medical staff if she could follow him and accompany him in the hospital.

"I said,'Can I go with him, they said no,'" she recalled.

Recalling how that September night happened, Kellogg said that now she was worried but confident, because Fitch had survived a more serious medical panic.

In 2012, he suffered a large-scale sepsis infection and suffered organ failure. He was placed in an induced coma. Kellogg, who has a letter of authorization for her husband's medical care, said that Fitch shocked everyone when she left the hospital after 3.5 weeks.

"He is from Teflon," she said.

But as the doctors in the Caesars emergency room started calling her to tell her the latest situation, she said that on this September night, her worries intensified.

"I started to receive these increasingly crazy calls from doctors, and they were always different doctors," she said.

Kellogg said she is confident of dealing with any medical crisis facing her husband. But telephone communication prevented her not only from understanding her husband's terrible situation, but also from defending and respecting his medical wishes.

"You can't make these decisions over the phone. It's inhumane," she said.

When Kellogg answered the phone late at night, Fauci's crisis worsened. At some point, Kellogg thought it was midnight and the phone rang again.

"She should come to the hospital," said the voice on the other end of the phone.

"I walked in, and I immediately, immediately, knew he would not come back from this incident," she said. "I have been with the dead. I know what it looks like. I know he is dying; I have no doubts in my heart."

Kellogg touched her husband's cheek. His left hand was holding her daughter's hand, but Kellogg couldn't hold his right hand. There were too many pipes.

He opened his eyes, but could not speak. When the doctor intubated him, they put an endotracheal tube into his mouth.

"I just whispered in his ear that I love him very much. I'll be happy if he can go home, but I don't think he will go, that's okay. I'll be fine. He just needs to take care of himself," she says.

"Then I kissed him," she said. "I have three minutes to say goodbye."

When Kellogg said that Fitch had stopped his heartbeat for the third time that night, she and Wendy had just arrived at the door.

"The doctor looked at me and I said,'Please call.'"

Kellogg's pain today is twofold.

First, she was not allowed to be with her husband in her last few hours, and second, she was frustrated that we were caught in these pandemic-related agreements, and 18% of eligible Sonoma County residents remained Not vaccinated.

Kellogg said she should be by her husband's last few hours, not just his last few minutes.

She has no complaints about the medical care Fauci received at Caesars. In fact, she described it as top-notch. However, there was a lack of communication that night, she said.

In August, one month before Foggy's death, her daughter went to the emergency room. At the time, Kellogg said that according to the COVID-19 agreement, she was told to wait outside. When her husband was rotated a few weeks later, she thought the same agreement was in place.

"It's not that someone said,'No, you are not allowed to enter here.' This is a self-evident agreement that prevents me from entering," she said. "Maybe I should push. Maybe I should say,'I need to be there. But I didn't do that. That's my sin."

In a statement, Kaiser Permanente Marin Sonoma’s senior vice president and regional manager Tarek Salaway stated that although hospital policies “restrict visitors and verify that vaccination or testing continues to follow current public health guidelines... part of our policy is to provide Compassionate exceptions, regardless of the patient's or visitor's vaccination status, can spend precious time with critically ill patients as their care allows."

Kellogg said that although she was vaccinated and she was the authorized client designated by her husband, she never made it clear.

"In my experience, no one in the emergency room knows this because no one asked me to come in before my husband had coded twice," she said. "If there really is a policy to let people in, it has never been communicated to me."

Not being with her husband changed her understanding of his condition and the decision she made. She said that if she was by his side, she would make a different choice.

"If I were there, he would never suffer for six hours."

But Kellogg retained most of the anger against the unvaccinated among us.

She said: "This epidemic could have ended this summer."

She said, delta, now omicron, variants-they feed on unvaccinated people.

"You are the problem. You can be part of the solution, but you are also part of the problem," she said. "You are letting the virus mutate."

Twenty years of marriage was compressed into three minutes in a sea of ​​pipes and buzzers, but her husband was unable to speak.

Furch did not die of COVID-19, but he spent most of the last few hours of confusion alone and shed tears on Kellogg. And angered her.

"This is because people don't get vaccinated, and we get these mutations. They don't happen in vaccinated people," she said. "We are ashamed of not getting millions (dose) globally. We are ashamed of all these anti-vaccine people."

Furch's death certificate did not indicate that COVID-19 was the cause of death. The non-Hodgkin's lymphoma he contracted decades ago and the impact on his immune system contributed to this.

But Kellogg believed that COVID-19 and the pandemic, and how it divided the community and the country, played a role in his last few hours.

"The country's distance from science is shocking, and the lack of trust is also shocking," she said.

It has a real impact. She lives with them every day.

"None of this should be political. Masks should not be political," she said. "There is no room for politics in the field of public health. We put ourselves here. We have done this to ourselves."

Editor's note: This story has been updated to correct the percentage of unvaccinated people in Sonoma County.

You can contact employee columnist Kerry Benefield at 707-526-8671 or kerry.benefield@pressdemocrat.com. On Twitter @benefield.

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