He’s not the oldest person to get COVID-19 and defeat it. In this country a 104-year-old in Oregon apparently holds that title. But the odds for Thompson were judged to be so long when he contracted the disease last month that he wasn’t put in intensive care, but rather on “comfort care.” That’s what they call it when they’re mostly just easing your pain as you undergo the dying process.
“We thought he was a goner for sure,” says his son, Jim Thompson Jr. of Seattle.
The state hasn’t released much data on people who have recovered from COVID-19. But of the thousand cases confirmed in patients 80 years or older, the death rate has been nearly 30 percent, according to Department of Health figures.
“He has always radiated this major life force,” says his daughter, Lisa Thompson. “But this time he told his wife (Florence) he thought he was going to die.”
Thompson was dizzy and fell at his Queen Anne retirement home in mid-March. He was diagnosed with COVID-19 and spent nearly three weeks with a fever and a hacking cough, slipping in and out of consciousness.
“I don’t remember much of anything,” Thompson says of his time in isolation.
No visitors were allowed, which his daughter says was the hardest part.
“He couldn’t understand why nobody would come and visit him,” Lisa Thompson said. “He crawled through broken glass with this thing, alone.”
He’s now tested negative, twice, and is headed to rehab.
Thompson is a World War II vet who also is a local sports trivia answer. He’s one of the only people known to have suited up on both sides of the Apple Cup, playing in different years for both the Washington State and UW football teams. That was another doozy of a tale: How he played in a dismal 1942 Apple Cup in which nobody could see the ball because of two inches of driving rain, and how Wazzu and the Huskies ended up catastrophically tying 0-0 so neither team got to go to the Rose Bowl. As he was saying, you think this pandemic is bad …
As a B-29 bombardier, in 1945, he walked the streets of Hiroshima 10 days after the U.S. nuclear bombing. He was part of a military recon team doing a survey of the destroyed Japanese city. “That was true insanity,” he told me. “I’m a lucky guy to get out of this” — he gestured to his hospital room — “but this is just another day in Seattle.”
Well, not exactly — we are in a global pandemic, after all. But if anyone gets a pass to rank the historical events of the last century, it’s this guy. The cumulative effect on me of his stories was reassurance. As bad as this may get, we’ll make it. Crawling through broken glass, maybe, but we’ll come out the other side.
