‘I Don't Even Know Their Names’: Coronavirus Survivor To Saviors

NILES, IL — Four days after leaving Lutheran General Hospital in Park Ridge, where he spent almost three months, Juan Mota Cruz may seem OK, but his body is still very fragile.

Lying in an impeccably clean bedroom with greenish walls in his Niles home, he struggles to catch a breath between sentences as he speaks.

The 45-year-old fence builder and native of Mexico feels that he escaped death, after pneumonia and coronavirus had swept him off his feet and kept him under a ventilator for over a month, and made him “visit the other world.”

He doesn’t know the names of doctors, nurses or therapists who cared for him at Lutheran General, because he doesn’t speak much English, but he calls them "very good people."

“It’s thanks to them, and to God, that I am still alive today,” an emotional Mota Cruz said in Spanish.

Before he was discharged early in July, a therapist came in and gave him a brand new walker.

"You will need one," she said.

Mota Cruz felt too weak that day to practice walking, but he took two steps just to please the "nice lady." She insisted he take the walker home.

“She told me to make sure I don’t leave it in the hospital, because she paid for it out of her own pocket. She even put my name on it,” he said. “I don’t remember her name, as I don’t remember many other things.”

Mota Cruz first started feeling sick in the beginning of April. He continued working for another week at the fencing company, despite his fever, chills and body aches.

One Friday in April, he asked his son and roommates who speak English to drive him to the hospital.

“I couldn’t breathe. I thought I was going to die. I knew I might never get out of the hospital,” Mota Cruz said.

He told his 18-year old son, the youngest of five children and the only one who followed him to the U.S., to be strong and take care of the family in Mexico.

“I was worried. I was scared. It didn’t look good,” said Mota Cruz’s son, also named Juan.

At Lutheran General's emergency room, he remembers having his nose swabbed and being in a lot of pain. He remembers a doctor telling a nurse to "give him more pain medicine." Then everything got blurry.

The doctors treated him with antibiotics and other drugs for the first month, family said, before they decided to put him on a ventilator due to cardiac arrest.

His son and two brothers relied on English-speaking roommates and Spanish-speaking hospital staff to communicate updates several times a day. For the first month, the family said, they never shared any good news.

“They kept telling us Juan is not doing good, having a high fever, difficulty breathing, fighting the equipment, his blood pressure going up,” Juan’s son said. “After they intubated him, they warned us that if he ever gets off the ventilator, he might never walk, talk, or eat normally again. But they promised to fight for him.”

Mota Cruz spent the next month in a coma. Family and friends checked on him daily, talked to him on Zoom, prayed and hoped for the best.

“I have been to the other world,” Mota Cruz said. “I’ve seen souls, and talked to my deceased father. He was young and well-dressed, with his white striped shirt and rolled sleeves.”

And then, on June 5, he woke up. Tears were rolling down his face as he struggled to talk to his son on Zoom for the first time. His first words were the same as that day when he was dropped off at the hospital.

“He told me to be strong for the family. And that he is going to fight,” Juan recalls.

“Nobody could believe that I made it,” Mota Cruz said. “Everybody who was entering the room, seeing me, was saying, ‘Oh my God.’”

He spent another month in rehabilitation relearning to talk, walk and eat by himself, before he was discharged on July 4.

Since he came to America in 2002, Mota Cruz worked as a janitor, a landscaper and, most recently, a fence builder. Sending money regularly, he managed to build a modest home for his family in his hometown of Asunción Cuyotepeji in the Mexican state of Oaxaca. His biggest concern now is that he won’t be able to work.

“I am a kind of person who likes hard work,” Mota Cruz said. “They told me I have to slow down now, because my lungs are very very weak. Not being able to work is making me a little depressed.”

Mota Cruz, who doesn’t have health insurance, wants to thank all hospital staff who cared for him, whose names he doesn’t even know.

“They treated me so well. Had it happened to me in Mexico, I would be dead in two days,” Mota Cruz said. “They cared for me, regardless of the money. In Mexico, they would care for me, if I gave them money first. I am very, very grateful,” an emotional Mota Cruz said, as he caught another breath.