After 11 Days in the Hospital With COVID-19, Peggy Levison Is Home

“If she had listened to her mother (‘Don’t come, I’m fine’), I doubt I would have survived.”

Peggy Levison
By Nigel Jaquiss

Last week, Rebecca Levison, a Portland schoolteacher, wrote about traveling across the country in a nearly empty plane to be with her mother, Peggy, who she feared was suffering from the COVID-19 virus.

Related: My Mother Has COVID-19. When her fever shot up to 102, I booked a red-eye from Portland, Ore., to Newark, N.J.

Rebecca Levison's fears were borne out, and not long after she arrived in New Jersey, her mother, 77, was hospitalized. (She was given a course of an anti-malarial medication doctors are using to combat COVID-19 but was never on a ventilator.)

Yesterday, Peggy Levison came home.

"After 11 days in Englewood Hospital, afraid to leave because I was getting such intensive 24/7 care and treatment, when the day actually came, I was ecstatic to go home," Peggy Levison said. "I missed my daughter, missed her delicious and healthy food and wanted to be in my own bed.

"My spirits are good, I'm getting stronger each day, and I'm so appreciative that with all my underlying health conditions, I was able to pull through. If she had listened to her mother ('Don't come, I'm fine'), I doubt I would have survived. Sometimes moms aren't always right."

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