UPDATE, 9/15/21: In August, we brought you the story of Keighlie Reaux, 24, a new mother who caught COVID-19 while on vacation at eight months pregnant. According to family members, Reaux passed away on Sept. 12, and the family has started a GoFundMe for financial relief.
“Incredibly sad news,” stated GoFundMe organizer Michelle Marcotte on Sept. 12. “Keighlie lost her fight with COVID today. There aren’t words to explain the gravity of this loss. Please keep Amie and Joe, Keighlie’s siblings, and her two precious sons who will never know their mommy in your prayers. They all gained an angel today, but have a long road ahead of them as their hearts are completely shattered right now.”
According to the family, Reaux gave birth to a son on Aug. 4 after being diagnosed with COVID-19 a week earlier. The boy was delivered via emergency C-section before Reaux was whisked away to a quarantined COVID unit. On Aug. 9, she was placed into a medically-induced coma. On Aug. 21, both her lungs collapsed, though doctors were able to stabilize her. She died on Sept. 12, leaving behind a three-week-old named Krew and a two-year-old named Karter.
ORIGINAL POST: LAFAYETTE, La. (CBS) — She is one of the sickest COVID patients inside the main ICU here at Our Lady of Lourdes Regional Medical Center in Lafayette.
Her mother is Amie.
“We let our guard down. We start venturing out. We booked a family vacation and we thought
like the rest of the world this isn’t a real virus; it didn’t attack our family.”
But it did.
When the Reaux family returned home from vacation, everyone in this photo tested positive for COVID.
All of them were unvaccinated and all of them recovered from the virus, except for Keighlie, who was 8 months pregnant at the time.
“She says I’m very, very weak and she had two purple circles bigger than silver dollars on her cheeks.”
That was eight days after she was diagnosed with COVID. Her mother rushed her to the emergency room.
Doctors delivered her baby Krew, and five days later Keighlie was placed on a ventilator.
So, Keileigh is doing ok. I don’t think that she’s a whole lot better, but certainly she’s not worse.
That was the update that Keighlie’s mother received from Dr. Frank Courmier.
Just from me personally, I just want you to know, thank you.
You said thank you. but something about the way you said thank you, to me, sounded personal to you.
“Yea, it’s personal. I know she’s the mom and she doesn’t want to lose her but I sure don’t want to either.”
“What’s going through your head”?
“I’m scared for her. I don’t want her to go through this. I hope we can pull her through. We’re just not in a phase yet where we know if she’s going to make it or not.”
Every one of the 24 patients in the main ICU here, are COVID positive.
Has a single disease ever filled every ICU beds in here?
“Never in my life time.”
Jennifer Mouton has been working ICU nurse for 37 years.
“We’ve been called murderers. We don’t know what we’re doing/i’m on social media the other day and someone is educating me on what we should be doing to treat our patients. He was the manager of Mattress Gallery, and I thought well everybody needs mattresses, I appreciate what you do, but in turn I expect the same kind of respect.”
“Welcome to Lafayette, born and raised.”
One of the beauties of South Louisiana is how people rally together to help each other after hurricanes, or floods, but in this pandemic, with only about 40 percent of this area fully vaccinated there’s fighting and division and hatred.
“If people could come and spend the day with me, I can assure you they’d be running to get vaccinated.
but social media in this area is filled with lies and misinformation about the virus and the vaccine.”
There’s another part of me that doesn’t understand how the public can believe random people on social media who have no medical background.
“To sit there and say they’re just making it out to be worse than it is, and it’s not that bad, you know I wish we were making it up. I wish I wasn’t holding the hands of someone as they’re about to be intubated as they look up and say: Am i going to die?”
Since the onset of Delta variant cases of COVID 19, Dr. Courmier has only had two patients come off the ventilator and survive.
It’s something Keighlie Reaux’s family is praying for.
They’ve left a rosary in her hand and a prayer blanket across her bed and in her line of sight, just in case she wakes up, are pictures of her family.
“The hardest part of leaving your adult child to fight this virus alone. She’s the youngest patient in the ICU
and she’s fighting for life.”
Over the weekend, Keighlie’s lungs collapsed. The family was called to the hospital for what they thought would be their final goodbye, but Dr. Courmier and his team revived her so she lives to fight another day.
