Gee’s college basketball coach survived COVID-19

As of today, more than 58,000 Americans have died from COVID-19 in just over a month. Thousands have also survived the virus, many of them facing the battle of their lives. Behind each number, each case, each death, is a person and their family.

Gee Scott’s college basketball coach, Tom Schermerhorn, is one of the survivors of this virus. He was put on a ventilator, fought for his life, and won. He lives in Indiana, but he called in to KIRO Radio’s Gee and Ursula Show to talk about his experience.

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“It has certainly been a month that I’ll never forget and, unfortunately, a month that I don’t remember a lot of what happened either,” Schermerhorn said.

When coronavirus first hit the United States, Schermerhorn remembers talking to his wife about it and being more worried about the health of his family, particularly his mom and dad. As a healthy, 50-year-old man, Schermerhorn did not expect to be severely affected by the virus.

“So from our family standpoint, we kind of self-quarantined ourselves out of precautions of bringing other people into it,” he said. “I really, honestly never thought that I would become one of those statistics.”

At the end of March, he was fighting an ear infection. He got antibiotics but couldn’t get rid of it, then his fever spiked and he just wasn’t feeling well. Schermerhorn and his wife video called one of his doctors who told him to go to the ER.

The first nurse he saw outside of the ER had been the youth group leader for his daughters when they were younger. He remembers looking at her face and seeing that she was scared. It meant so much to him to see her, but it made it all the more serious and real to him.

“That night they put me on oxygen,” he said. “At that point, I will be honest with you, I don’t remember probably the next six or seven days.”

Schermerhorn thought he was on a vacation at one point, and when he came to, he said he had no idea what had happened, no idea what his family had to go through.

Because of his position in the small community he lives in, being the athletic director of a local high school, he does have some public visibility. There was even a small parade when he went home from the rehabilitation center with police, fire trucks, and a visit to the school.

“And as I’m sitting there and looking at all of this happening around me, [I realized] this was never about me,” he said. “It’s never been about me. … It’s about these people with a mask on. It’s about the nurses. … They’ve got kids at home, and they were, you could tell, they’re genuinely scared about what they’re going to take home to their 2, 3, 4-year-old. It genuinely affected me in a way that I would have never imagined.”

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Even a week after Schermerhorn came off the ventilator, he still was being asked questions as the health care workers continue to learn more about this virus.

“I just don’t think people know how this affects us,” Schermerhorn said. “It just affects everybody so differently. It’s not a cookie cutter response as far as ‘hey, you’re this old’ or ‘hey, you’ve got this underlying condition.’ I just don’t think we know and I think we’re trying to figure it out.”

Listen to the Gee and Ursula Show weekday mornings from 9 a.m. – 12 p.m. on KIRO Radio, 97.3 FM. Subscribe to the podcast here.