A former Kansas school superintendent who was turned down three times for a coronavirus test has died after a week of “immeasurable suffering,” his wife said.
“The fight is over. I am absolutely heartbroken,” Joanna Wilson wrote on Facebook as she announced the death of her 74-year-old husband, Dennis, on Saturday.
“It has been an indescribably horrible week of immeasurable suffering on the part of the love of my life and then certainly on the part of our three children and our 6 grandchildren who could only watch helplessly from a distance,” she said.
“He was my love, my soulmate, a devoted father, and beloved grandfather,” she said.
Wilson — a former teacher and superintendent who later became a magician — first went to an urgent care facility on March 12 but was told to go home and rest, his wife said in an earlier post.
He went to a different urgent care the next day, but was again sent home even after testing negative for flu, his wife wrote.
By March 15, he struggled to breathe and went to a hospital, where an X-ray showed he had pneumonia, she said. “The doctor suspected … COVID-19 although he didn’t meet the criteria for testing,” his wife said at the time.
Wilson — a former teacher and superintendent who later became a magician — first went to an urgent care facility on March 12.FacebookHe finally got tested the following day, Monday last week, after his condition deteriorated to the point where he needed treatment in an intensive care unit.
“Test results back: Confirmed! Please keep us in your prayers. And pray hard. Please!” his wife pleaded on Facebook at the time.
After his death, his grieving widow now struggles in isolation, facing the fresh “travesty” of not being able to arrange a suitable send-off, she wrote.
“I cannot go anywhere or have visitors in so I’m now finding myself in the grips of great sorrow and grief completely alone. Where do I begin?” she asked, overwhelmed by the task of “completely ridding our home and belongings of Covid-19.”
One of Wilson’s sons, Luke Wilson, told the Kansas City Star that his dad “was technically elderly but pretty damn healthy for a man in his 70s.”
“The virus is stealth, isolating and cruel; seemingly coming out of nowhere, infecting him early in the outbreak without high-risk exposure or travel,” Luke Wilson told the paper.
“We were unprepared to handle this enemy and my beautiful father paid the ultimate price.”
