HILLSBORO, Ore. — A Hillsboro family was taking precautions against COVID-19 but the disease still turned their world upside down. The Villegas family shared their story with KGW to try to save other families from going through the pain and anguish they went through.
With Juan Villegas' asthma, his family was worried about catching the virus. They've been wearing masks, washing their hands and have stayed home as much as possible since the pandemic started, with grocery store outings accounting for most of their activity.
Yet Juan, his wife Azuzena and three of their four kids still got it. Azuzena was the first to get diagnosed, and then it spread throughout the family. The Villegases said their three children who tested positive were asymptomatic and their youngest - who tested negative - had to stay with family while everyone quarantined.
"How did we get it, where did we get it? And contact tracing called us and were like, ‘We don't know what happened,'” Juan Villegas said. “That’s why it's so important for me to get the story out and understand that we have to be vigilant every single second with this thing. It doesn't matter, it doesn't discriminate. If it finds a way, it will get in you and cause some havoc.”
That havoc came in late June for 37-year-old Juan, in the form of a nine-day hospitalization. After feeling fine, the virus began invading his lungs and turned them into what felt like cement, causing him to be unable to breathe on his own.
In the hospital he was hooked up to oxygen, alone and away from everyone he loved. At one point, he thought he may not make it.
“There was a night where I was put on a high-flow oxygen - basically a mask with high flow – because it was pumping air at you at high rates. It’s horrible,” he said. "Everything with COVID is up and down, up and down, and it just feels like one day you're getting better and the other day you feel like you're going to die."
But he said his faith and his family kept him fighting.
“Knowing this thing might take me out and away from them that was the biggest driver," Juan said. "That helped push me forward in the situation that I needed to survive for them."
Azuzena remembers that same night as the night she prayed hardest.
“God gave me strength to go through,” Azuzena said. “It was the worst nightmare.”
She mustered up the strength to be there for their kids as she, herself, suffered through multiple emergency room visits, nausea, fever, fatigue and headaches because of the virus.
“They were scared. I had to be for them try to comfort them, to try to say, ‘hey, everything is going to be OK'" Azuzena said. "But there's some scary thoughts, very scary thoughts, about my husband. I didn’t know that he was coming back.”
"There’s no other way. We have to fight with all our strength, with everything we have,” Azuzena said.
Juan eventually pulled through while in the hospital. He thanks his medical team for treating him with the experimental drug Remdesivir, steroids and asthma medication.
Today, he's back to running a couple miles and taking better care of himself, though he worries about getting it again.
“It really is a feeling of it's stalking you. Man, is this thing going to get me again?" Juan said. “It's a roulette wheel; you don't know what you're dealing with.”
The Villegases want to tear down the stigma and guilt around contracting COVID-19, and tear down the divisions growing in our country over it.
"It shouldn't be politicized. It should be about what's good for us as people, as humans and empathize,” Juan said. “You have to think about everybody else.”