An 87-year-old former Marine who spent two tours in Vietnam and has multiple health conditions survived an epic battle with coronavirus, asserting, “The Marine Corps trains us to deal with adversity; they teach us to adapt, overcome, and continue the mission.” He added another reason for his survival: “And finally, the grace of God. That’s what I have here.”
Franklin Eller told CBS News, “I’m feeling great. And I was really fortunate to find myself laying here at the Mayaguez Medical Center. As you may know, I was evacuated from a ship; we were on a cruise in the Caribbean. And I was feeling pretty lousy about six days into the 14-day cruise. So I kinda let it go, and it kept getting worse and worse and I had trouble breathing and I couldn’t walk very far. So finally on the third day my wife convinced me to go down to the medical center. I checked in there; they saw I was in pretty bad shape, they did all the tests they could do; they didn’t have any of the virus tests …”
Eller said he saw the X-rays taken of his lungs on the cruise ship. He recalled, “Both lungs were practically black, and filled with infection.… I have emphysema; I have heart disease; I have a leaky heart valve in one lung; I have peripheral neuropathy, and I have an irregular heartbeat.”
Dr. Monica Egozcue, the ICU director at the hospital, stated, “I have to say that I saw his chest X-ray from the cruise, and from that moment I knew that we were not dealing with a common pneumonia process. So that’s why we treated this patient from day one as a possible COVID-19 patient.” She continued, “When a patient has pneumonia, the findings on X-rays are called infiltrates. So his infiltrates on the chest X-ray were more central, what we call perihilar. That’s not usual in pneumonia. Pneumonia usually affects a certain part of the lungs either the upper zone or the lower one. Infiltrates were located in the central part of the lungs, which is not common in the pneumonia process. So at that moment we had high suspicion plus his white blood cells were elevated, however, he had lymphodemia, which is found in these types of patients … he was treated always like a COVID-19 case.
Eller said he had been subsequently tested twice and was found negative, a prerequisite for being released from the hospital
He concluded, “I really owe my recovery to four things; first of all, the Marine Corps trains us to deal with adversity; they teach us to adapt, overcome, and continue the mission. That’s what I’ve tried to do; every time I’ve encountered an adverse condition in my life and with two tours in Vietnam plus other national emergencies that the Marines responded to, I feel that I can speak on the subject of adversity. The second one is my wife and my family back in San Diego in Humboldt County, California; their love and support. Of course, we could not have done it without the hospital’s outstanding efforts. And finally, the grace of God. That’s what I have here.”