‘He’s a miracle’: SC dad welcomed home after COVID left him hospitalized for 130 days
Cheering staff lined a hospital hallway as Kool & The Gang’s “Celebration” blasted over the speakers. Chad Hardee, the bottom half of his face hidden under a mask, wheeled out of the hospital doors, where a white stretch limo greeted him.
Teary-eyed family and friends clapped. Whoops and shouts of “coming home!” rivaled the music coming from inside the hospital. Hardee stood up from the wheelchair and walked himself into the back of the limo, perhaps some of the most meaningful steps he would ever take.
Half an hour later, Hardee’s yard was dotted with signs, balloons, family and friends ready to welcome him back to his Conway home, a scene that was once virtually inconceivable as Hardee’s health grew worse before it got better.
Then the limo turned onto his street. Hardee was home.
“We rode home in that limo, he’d never been in a limo before,” Hardee’s wife Jean Marie said. “It was like, is this really happening? After five months? Somebody pinch me.”
With his dad by his side and a support belt around his waist, Hardee gingerly approached his house. Clapping family and friends surrounded him, but his gaze fixed on the six steps leading up to his back door.
To him, those steps may as well have been Mount Everest.
One careful step at a time, Hardee climbed his back steps Friday for the first time since January, when he was less than two weeks into his bout with COVID-19.
It took nearly six months in a hospital bed, four different healthcare facilities and a host of medical complications, but finally, he was back.
“He’s a miracle,” said Sammy Gore, Hardee’s friend and neighbor. “There’s no explanation how or why he should still be alive.”
At 47 years old and in good health, Hardee didn’t know how much the virus would take from him. Hardee was in a medically induced coma for weeks and heavily sedated for the better part of three months. He missed his wife and their three kids, he missed holidays and birthdays, he missed cookouts with his neighbors.
He has no memory of the worst of it.
“I woke up here, and I thought it was still January,” Hardee said at Vibra Hospital of Charleston after spending time in three different medical units.
It was April.
‘If you do not do this, you will die’
Those close to Hardee are glad he doesn’t remember those brutal months, but it’s a time that will be permanently etched into their own memories.
Hardee, who works at the state department of transportation in Georgetown, first tested positive for the virus January 6, and less than two weeks later, he was in the hospital. But he doesn’t remember getting there.
Hardee’s oxygen levels were alarmingly low, hovering around 80%. As a nurse, Jean Marie Hardee knew that a healthy level was 95% or higher, and she started to worry. She asked him some questions, but the answers only concerned her more.
Hardee didn’t know where he was. He didn’t know his wife’s name or his dad’s name. He has no memory of the ambulance ride, only fighting the medical staff who wanted to put him on a ventilator, and asking them to promise him he’d wake up.
“[They] said, ‘If you do not do this, you will die,’” Hardee said about the ventilator.
After initially being hospitalized at Conway Medical Center, Hardee was moved to the Medical University of South Carolina in Charleston, where he stayed in the COVID-19 unit until early March.
Due to hospital safety precautions, Hardee’s only communication with his family was through FaceTime and phone calls until he was moved from the COVID-19 unit to the medical intensive care unit.
“I didn’t know if he heard me or not,” Jean Marie Hardee said. “But heck, it made me feel better just to talk to him.”
‘We were scared Chad wasn’t going to make it’
The virus ravaged his body, sparking a pneumonia infection that spurred further complications, including two small strokes. Hardee’s case puzzled doctors, and the possibility of his recovery began to appear bleak.
Once physically fit and devoid of major health issues, Hardee failed to sit on the edge of his bed without help. Nurses and aides assisted him with once-mundane everyday tasks like bathing and getting dressed.
“We were scared Chad wasn’t going to make it,” Hardee’s mom Sandra said. “One time, [the doctors] said ‘We’ve done everything we can do, we’ve tried everything we’ve got. Now it’s up to Chad.’”
Hardee’s dad, Samuel Hardee, added: “The kids are supposed to bury the parents, the parents ain’t supposed to bury the kids.”
Those days are gone now, hopefully for good.
One day in late February, Hardee moved his toes, and the course of his recovery changed.
That was the sign his family and medical team needed — it meant he could listen to, comprehend and execute what the nurses asked of him.
“All those nurses in there, they were jumping up and down,” Jean Marie Hardee said, adding that her husband doesn’t remember this breakthrough moment. “It was like a celebration because he was responding to commands.”
From there, Hardee’s condition improved. He was transferred from MUSC to Vibra Hospital of Charleston, and by the time he was moved to Tidelands Health Rehabilitation Hospital, he began to restore his strength.
Gone was the ventilator, replaced by Hardee’s own strength. Gone were the chest tubes once necessary to drain fluid from his body. Gone was the feeding tube. And finally, gone was the wheelchair, replaced by a walker and finally, following intense physical therapy, Hardee was walking on his own once again.
The physical therapy was grueling and frustrating at times. But it allowed Hardee to get home as soon as possible, and to him, that made the work worth it.
“You see the progress you’ve made, just that one day,” Hardee said. “Then it’s like, I wonder what I can do tomorrow.”
‘A patient like Chad renews your hope’
Meanwhile, people across Horry County and around the country had been tracking his progress — people Hardee didn’t even know.
Jean Marie Hardee posted detailed updates on Facebook several days a week, and a loyal band of supporters followed, leaving comments with prayers, well wishes and heart emojis.
To the Hardees, Horry County is home, and has been for generations. A few months into Hardee’s coronavirus fight, his relatives could barely go out in public without people asking about his progress and wishing him well. If a stranger at the gas station or grocery store asks Samuel Hardee how his son is doing, chances are he’ll let them check in with Hardee themselves.
“My dad [says] ‘Here, talk to him,’” Hardee said. “And random people just call my cellphone: ‘I just want to call and check on you.’”
Hardee’s inner circle attributes his recovery largely to two things: people and prayer. The family can list numerous churches in the area and even in other states that have dedicated prayers to Hardee, and his hospital room was filled with cards and letters expressing well wishes for his recovery.
News of Hardee’s “miracle” case had spread. By the time he moved to Vibra, doctors had become interested in him and his case. He said doctors who had read his file decided to come see him and his progress for themselves.
Hardee became a symbol of hope against a grim backdrop of the pandemic as a whole. In Horry County alone, more than 450 people have died of the virus and nearly 29,500 cases have been reported since the beginning of the pandemic, according to the S.C. Department of Health and Environmental Control.
“It almost is a cliche, how exhausted the healthcare field is, it is so true,” said Dr. Lisa Smaldone, medical director at Tidelands’ rehab facility. “Having a patient like Chad, just renews your hope that not all is lost and that what we do really does make a difference.”
‘It’s not fake, it’s not a joke’
As the world does its best to emerge from the pandemic and vaccinations continue, the Hardees are doing their best to understand the magnitude of their personal experience.
His close friends and family, thankful for a joyful homecoming and exhausted from months of worry and prayer, has largely been vaccinated, though if you would have asked some of Hardee’s loved ones, particularly his dad and his friend Gore, about getting inoculated back in December, they might have shrugged their shoulders.
“I’d made my mind up a long time ago, no shot, no kind of vaccine, no flu shot, I never took nothing like that,” Samuel Hardee said. “But I want to take this one to make everyone safer. After Chad and everything, I took this one.”
With all its global prominence, the Hardees and their friends didn’t expect the virus to become this personal.
It could be similar to the flu, they thought. He’s young and healthy, they reassured themselves.
But now, they’ve had intimate exposure to the virus’ toll, and they know there’s a certain amount of luck responsible for his recovery.
“It’s kind of scary knowing the fact that you were in the same hospital, or someone right across the hall from me had it and didn’t make it,” Hardee said. “It’s not fake. It’s not a joke.”
‘This has changed me as a person’
More doctor’s appointments and therapy are on the way, and it could be a year until Hardee is fully recovered. But he hopes to soon turn his focus toward getting back to the things he loves most: cooking and playing with his daughter, Ava, and the neighborhood kids.
Hardee’s neighbors and family members are ready to have him back at the grill, too.
“It’s my house, my grill, but he takes over,” Gore said. “And that’s pretty much what we’ve always done.”
Neighborhood hangouts and family dinners, once routine gatherings, are now goals that will mark a turning point in Hardee’s recovery, a long-awaited return to his old self.
But he won’t be exactly as he once was. He suspects COVID-19 will leave him forever changed.
His parents have also noticed a shift.
“Every time we talk to him on the phone now … he’ll say ‘I love you,’” Samuel Hardee said. “He never did that before.”
The virus tested his body, but it also altered his mind. Hardee says he’ll have a different perspective on things like going to church and prioritizing his relationships with his family because of his spell with COVID-19.
“It’s changed me,” he said. “This has changed me as a person.”
This story was originally published June 4, 2021 at 11:24 AM.
