By all accounts, Jim Rivetts shouldn’t be in his mid-valley home, recovering from Covid-19, cracking jokes, and hoping for warmer weather. And all accounts include one from the ICU doctor in Twin Falls who admitted Jim on March 20. In his hospital room, all alone, hooked up to a high flow of oxygen and so weak the thought of having to get up to use the restroom was completely overwhelming, the doctor greeted Jim with, “I read your chart. Wow. It’s a good thing you don’t have Covid-19 or you’d be dead.” “Those were literally his opening words to me,” Jim remembered. The reason for the doctor’s dire prediction? Jim’s recent health history and underlying conditions were what government officials, physicians, and everyone with any kind of platform warned was a worst case scenario in the time of coronavirus spread. But they didn’t think he had it.
By way of background: Last year at this time, Jim was lifeflighted to Boise after his blood oxygen dipped to 51 percent. In the previous months, he had successful surgery on collapsed vertebrae. Jim quickly returned to skiing with his grandson and target shooting with his friends. He recovered so well he and his wife, Nancy, even took a trip halfway around the world to Australia and New Zealand where they fished and cruised. Upon returning to the Wood River Valley, though, everything quickly changed. Jim’s fingers turned blue, his breathing became shallower and shallower. He was helicoptered to Boise, intubated, and hospitalized for seven days. What was wrong remained something of a mystery. Fast forward to this February, Jim was contending with interstitial fibrosis and limited lung function, recently started a clinical trial in Denver, and worried that he might be a candidate for a lung transplant. It was not a place he wanted to be when he heard about this mysterious respiratory virus ravaging the world.
“It was a perfect storm for a bad outcome,” Jim said. “I had recently started a very high dose of steroids for the fibrosis which lowers your immune system and my lungs were obviously already very compromised. The day I got sick, I had 61 percent lung capacity. It was nuclear fallout – like the whole house being wet with gasoline walking around with a lit match.”
Jim noticed trouble with his breathing starting on March 19, but without a fever or a cough, he didn’t immediately think Covid. Finally, on the 20th, he put on his flip flops, long underwear and a ski vest and drove himself to St. Luke’s Wood River – at about the same time the hospital was forced to close regular operations. “I walked in, told them I was short of breath. Other than that I was felling fine, I just couldn’t get any air. Within 30 minutes, though, they had me in an ambulance to Twin Falls,” Jim recalled. But things weren’t looking good. “The doctor in Twin told me, ‘I see you have a Do Not Resuscitate order. I also see you don’t want to be on a ventilator. In your condition I want you to know that if you do go on a ventilator, you won’t come off of it. What do you want to do?’ That really scared me. I told him I would have to think about it. And this was before they even knew what was wrong with me.”
The doctor’s initial diagnosis proved premature, A few days later, Jim did, indeed, test positive for the virus like so many of his neighbors. He was devastated and explained, “Right after one nurse came in and told me I was sure doing good, another came and told me they got the test results back and I had it. I think I’m a pretty straight-forward, honest guy but I started to cry. I couldn’t help thinking about my family, the people who mean the most to me in my life. I thought I was never going to get to play with my kids and grandkids again. You have no idea what that looks like.”
His nine days in the hospital were the worst of his life despite what he calls exemplary care, and he’s had a few previous tough days in the hospital. He recalled, “I was in the ICU, all by myself, I couldn’t talk to anyone, couldn’t see anyone. Everyone that came in has a Mars suit on. I was so sick. There was nothing to do but try to breathe and worry and wonder when the other shoe was going to drop. I was so sick I could not go to the bathroom, so sick I could not stand up. I had horrible diarrhea and a violent cough. I didn’t sleep the whole time I was there because I was so hopped up on steroids, and I started to hallucinate.” He said this stay in the hospital with nothing but the virus for company was emotionally and physically the most painful experience of his 72 years. “I wouldn’t wish it on anyone, anyone” he said. “The emotional and mental stress I went through was almost unbearable.” Part of Jim’s stress was compounded by the fact that his wife of 50 years also tested positive and had been to the Emergency Room twice. His son, Jed, drove his mother to the hospital so it was an easy assumption that he, too, would be infected. “I couldn’t talk them regularly. All I could do was worry,” he said. “It was the hardest thing I’ve ever had to go through without a doubt.”
Despite all this, Jim started hearing from his nurses and doctors just how well he was doing. After a while, he actually began to believe them. “I started to get better, I don’t know why,” Jim explained. Despite becoming diabetic due to the steroids and having continuous EKG monitoring because doctors were worried about heart function, on top of the more conventional Covid concerns, Jim started to turn a corner. “The doctors would come in and say, ‘We’ve never seen this before.’ There is no real reason why. I don’t know why I got to do well and so many people don’t,” he reflected. Jim credits his family, his core 13, comprised of his wife, three children, their spouses, and his grandchildren for giving him something to live for and helping him stay as positive as possible.
Daughter Jaime said her father hid the worst of his condition from all of them until he was released from the hospital. They knew things were serious, but didn’t know the details. Jaime, who with husband Danny Walton, has two darling little girls, sent her father daily videos, as did her siblings and their families. “He was really positive on the phone,” she remembered. “He would always tell me the best part of his day, even if that was something as simple as eating a cookie. He was trying not to worry all of us. We sent him photos and videos and memes that were uplifting. I couldn’t believe just how bad it actually had been when he finally told us. It was so sad that we couldn’t have done more to help him.” Jaime isn’t all that surprised about her father’s recovery, though. “He is the toughest man I know,” she said. “He has kind of a cowboy attitude that you just get it done and that you need to be self-reliant.”
The doctor who feared Jim might not make it out of the ICU, even before he got the Covid diagnosis, obviously, didn’t know Jim Rivetts like his daughter does. The ski to die skier who can easily log 120 to 140 days on the hill a season, also loves to bike, fly fish, and shoot trap and skeet with his buddies, as often as four times a week. He has an irreverent sense of humor and draws people in with his entertaining stories and banter. The doctor who was so blunt with him on his admission in Twin Falls became a friend by the end of his stay. “I was the first patient he saw in the morning on his rounds and he came back to my room to visit every afternoon when his shift was over. When I think about it, his directness was the right way to be. I appreciated,” Jim said. When he left the hospital, the staff who took such good care of him were as happy as he was that he was healthy enough to go home. Many lined up when he was released and cheered.
Jim had many reasons to feel grateful when he was discharged, and one of the most pressing was that he didn’t want to miss his 51st wedding anniversary. “Last year, I was intubated for our 50th anniversary. I did not want to be intubated for our 51st,” he said. Wanting to surprise Nancy, on March 29, he secured a ride home from Twin Falls to his car that was still at St. Luke’s Wood River. “I drove home, parked in the driveway, got my oxygen bottle out, and clanked up the stairs. I was all masked and gloved up, and our dog Frankie barked at me,” Jim laughed. “Nancy, who was still sick, came to the top of the stairs and wanted to know what was going on. I told her I hitchhiked home.” When asked if she was surprised, Nancy responded, “Surprised? More like scared!” The two toasted their anniversary is the best way they could, just happy to be together.
Jim said he is not out of the woods yet, and remains on oxygen. But he says he has a lot to look forward to. He can’t wait to be able to spend time with the family who he cherishes more than ever, to enjoy the warmer months that have to come soon, to be with friends. The mountains are calling, the grandchildren are calling, and Jim plans to respond.