Beacon COVID survivor makes plea to get vaccinated

Maria Galvez hopes that by sharing her story, someone reading this will get vaccinated. She didn’t. Her husband didn’t. They wore masks and thought they’d be fine. Maria was hospitalized with COVID for 20 days. Her nurses helped her say good-bye to her husband on an iPad at Memorial Hospital. “I thought I was going to die. I cry and wonder when, when can I get rid of this?” Maria says, holding up the nasal tube connecting to an oxygen tank in her South Bend home. “We all need to get vaccinated now. … We are killing ourselves, instead of helping ourselves.” Dr. Ismail Al-Ani, Critical Care Pulmonologist, reiterates how most patients who are dying from COVID or who become sick enough to be hospitalized are unvaccinated. “Please take it,” he says. “If you are not thinking about yourself, think about your neighbor, or think about our hospitals.”