Josephine Tapiru had been pulling extra shifts, working from 9 a.m. until sometimes 11 p.m., because the North Side nursing home was getting more and more short-staffed as co-workers fell ill.
She kept a close watch on her temperature: still 98. Fine, she thought.
After clocking out on April 3 from Park View Rehab, Tapiru told a friend her throat was getting sore and she was coughing. She stopped at a drugstore, picked up a bottle of NyQuil and went to bed as soon as she got home.
Sometime that night, she slipped into a coma. The world’s novel coronavirus was beginning to take its terrible toll on her family.
Tapiru was taken to the intensive care unit at St. Francis Hospital in Evanston. Her husband would be admitted there within a week. Four days later, their 20-year-old son Luis Jr. was found dead on the couch of their home. Four more days passed and Josephine died, too, without coming out of her coma.
Friends and family waited nearly a week, when Luis Sr. was finally removed from a ventilator, to tell him about the deaths of his wife and son…
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