As a 45-year-old farmer recovers from COVID, his wife and friends run 90 kilometres
CBC
Earlier this year, Sarah VanNetten drove from Simcoe to Hamilton every day to see her husband Mike, a hospitalized COVID patient clinging to his life on a machine that did the work of his heart and lungs.
But on Friday, she and her team are traveling the route another way — on foot.
From April to June, Sarah spent each day gowned and masked at Hamilton General Hospital, sitting at her 45-year-old husband's bedside as an extracorporeal membrane oxygenation (ECMO) machine kept him alive. The nurses knew Sarah by name. When Mike was in a coma, they held one-sided sports conversations with him. Every little sign of progress — a lift, a step, a walk — the workers gave Mike a round of applause.
Now that Mike — a farmer and factory worker known around town by his nickname, Chicken — is home and recovering, Sarah is doing a 90-kilometre Simcoe-to-Hamilton relay marathon as part of Hamilton Health Sciences Foundation's Strides for Health-Care Heroes. The foundation is fundraising for a new ECMO machine.
Sarah and the team, called Chicken's HIIT Chicks, will start at the VanNetten farm. They'll use trails to walk and ride the route, switching off five kilometres at a time. They've already raised more than $17,000.
Sarah says it's the least she can do.
"They are the kindest, most intelligent people," she said of the health-care workers. "They saved Mike's life."