‘I WAS GOING TO DIE’

By ANDREW MCGINN

a.mcginn@beeherald.com

COVID-19 took a lot out of George Walker, but it didn’t take away his sense of humor.

“I can still clear a room pretty quick when I walk in,” Walker joked.

Actually, he’s only half-joking about that one.

More than a month after being cleared of the highly contagious novel coronavirus — a pathogen that took a man known countywide for the gift of gab and almost quite literally deprived him of all air — life is returning to normal for the 57-year-old car dealer/farmer, or at least what passes now for normal.

Walker and wife Laurie illuminated the Open sign Monday morning at Walker Auto Center on North Elm Street in Jefferson for the first time since before St. Patrick’s Day.

For 12 long days beginning March 26, the rural Paton resident found himself drained of strength, starved of appetite and struggling to breathe. There were times when he wondered if this was what it felt like to die.

All the while, new forms of life were taking advantage of his absence — weeds shot up through the cracks of his car lot, and a robin made her nest directly on top of a light sensor, keeping Walker Auto Center perpetually lit during this lost spring.

Walker was quick to joke that Monday was a “soft grand reopening.”

“I’d say it’s a pretty good community,” he said, referring to the cards, prayers and well-wishes that poured in during his white-knuckled bout of COVID-19. “It was pretty overwhelming.”

When Greene County Public Health back on April 6 announced the first confirmed case locally of COVID-19, officials by law could only disclose that patient zero was an “individual between 41-60 years of age.”

HIPAA is little match, however, for the Greene County grapevine.

That George Walker was, in fact, patient zero was common knowledge.

“I think it traveled around in about a half-hour,” Walker said.

But the grapevine isn’t always reliable, either. One person reported seeing Walker at the grocery store. Another heard he died.

“We’ve heard a lot of misinformation,” Laurie Walker said. 

Ironically, by the time Walker was informed that his COVID-19 test had come back positive, the worst was already behind him.

What’s more, Walker had gone into self-isolation before it was even cool.

“I don’t want people to think I was out partying at Daytona Beach,” Walker said. “I followed the guidelines, and still got it.”

Having been diagnosed with sarcoidosis — the same autoimmune disease afflicting former KCCI meteorologist John McLaughlin — Walker wasn’t sure his already inflamed lungs would be able to endure this new respiratory illness if he caught it. So he went home to the farm and, beginning March 15, stayed there, exiling himself as news of the pandemic’s arrival in Iowa changed daily, if not hourly.

Walker made the decision to hunker down the same day — Sunday, March 15 — that Gov. Kim Reynolds recommended Iowa schools close for four weeks.

At the time, there were just 22 confirmed cases of COVID-19 in the state, and official guidance from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention was to postpone events of 50 or more people.

Come Monday, Laurie closed up the car lot and prepared to join her husband in quarantine.

That Tuesday, gatherings of more than 10 people were prohibited in Iowa, and dine-in restaurants, gyms and movie theaters closed under a state of public health disaster emergency.

Little could George Walker imagine that he was already infected.

He suspects he most likely contracted the novel coronavirus at a wedding on March 14 in Boone County. There were only 18 confirmed cases of COVID-19 in Iowa at the time, and many were tied to international travel — not nearly enough of a threat to keep him or anyone else from attending the wedding of Paton native Carly Marquardt, who’s like a daughter.

In fact, the Walkers were tapped to be the host and hostess.

“Obviously,” he said in retrospect, “I shook a lot of hands that night.”

Ten days later, at home on the farm, he was hit by an onset of chills.

“I’m a warm-blooded person,” he remembers thinking, “I shouldn’t be this cold.”

Two days after that, he woke with a fever of 102.1 degrees “and felt like someone had dragged me through a knothole.”

“The timing of it was unfortunate for us,” Laurie Walker said. “He was sick when it was all new.”

With her husband growing ever weaker, she called his pulmonologist in Ames, only to be told they didn’t want to see him.

She called again. Same response.

“It’s a helpless feeling, for sure,” she said.

Where before there was only frustration, now there was fright.

“You know it’s bad,” George Walker explained, “when the doctor doesn’t even want to see you.”

For Laurie Walker, the telltale sign that her husband of nearly 35 years was gravely ill came down to the fact that he wasn’t talking.

George Walker is a talker.

“I had no air to talk,” he said.

Even though Walker didn’t qualify in those early days for a coveted COVID-19 test — he wasn’t old enough, and never developed a sore throat or dry cough — he finally got the OK to be tested at a triage unit in Ames.

There, a man dressed like he was ready to handle nuclear waste swabbed both of Walker’s nostrils — one swab for influenza, the other for COVID-19.

For Walker, the illness seemed to only intensify the longer it lingered.

Unable to lay flat and struggling to breathe, Walker thought he might die in his recliner.

“It felt like I was breathing through a thimble of air at the top of my throat,” he said. “There were a few days I thought, ‘This is it. I’m in trouble.’”

Ultimately, Walker pulled through without hospitalization.

When the COVID-19 test returned positive, Public Health told Walker to call everyone he’d been around in recent days.

He made just four calls.

Had he not closed his business and self-isolated, the affable car salesman estimates he would have encountered — and potentially infected — 200 people.

“People need to realize you might not be sick, but you might still be carrying it,” Laurie said.

That, she said, was obviously the case of whoever infected her husband. Whoever that person was didn’t know they had it.

As a salesman, George Walker is admittedly apolitical, at least publicly. But now that he’s survived COVID-19, something just doesn’t sit right with the stay-at-home protests he sees on TV.

“I’m not going to lie,” he said of the protestors, “I get a little disgusted with them.

“I didn’t get to see my granddaughter for two months. That’s a killer.”

Bottom line: It’s no hoax.

“Just treat it with caution,” Walker urged. “You can’t quit living, but treat it with caution.”