‘There Were Times When I Was Ready To Go’: Peshtigo Mayor Is Home After Monthslong COVID-19 Battle

Cathi Malke had been in the hospital for three weeks when her blood-oxygen level started falling fast. Her lung had collapsed.

Nurses switched out her breathing tube for an oxygen mask. It didn’t stabilize her. She felt like she was drowning; she was gasping for air. All around her, things started to move quickly.

A doctor at the Aurora Medical Center-Bay Area, a hospital in Marinette, called Cathi’s husband, Carl. There was one bed left in the critical care unit in Green Bay. Cathi needed to go there right away, and she’d need to be on a ventilator. She would be under anesthetic, probably for days.

Doctors allowed Carl into the room for just a few moments before they put Cathi under. She knew it could be the last time she ever spoke to her husband. It was hard to think of what to say, and there wasn’t time to say much. She told him she loved him.

Cathi was unconscious for nine days. For three weeks after that, she spent most of her time on her stomach — an awful, uncomfortable pose that is sometimes the only way to keep patients’ oxygen levels up. She had so many tubes and devices attached to her, she said, that it took six nurses just to situate her.

After the hospital, she spent more than a month in a rehabilitation facility in Peshtigo, her hometown. She first got sick with COVID-19 and entered the hospital in mid-July. She didn’t come home until November.

More than 460,000 people in Wisconsin have had COVID-19, according to state data. Nearly 420,000 have recovered from the disease. Many of those cases were mild — some were even asymptomatic. For more than 4,500 people, the disease was fatal. On Tuesday, the state reported 120 new deaths, the most in a single day since the beginning of the pandemic.

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Her time in the hospital took her muscle mass; she couldn’t walk when she came home. She still gets winded at times and has to sit down. But she is home. She’ll spend Christmas together with her husband of 42 years; her son who is living with them; her sister, who also lives with them as she undergoes cancer treatments; and with her three enormous Saint. Bernards. On a mild December day, she can sit on her porch and watch the geese on the Peshtigo River.

Cathi chose to tell her story publicly now, she said, because she hopes it will help others by showing how serious and life-threatening COVID-19 can be. She also wants to let thousands of other families whose loved ones are hospitalized know they are not alone. She hopes others can find hope in her experience of getting as sick as it is possible to be, and then slowly, with lots of help, recover.

In First Weeks In The Hospital, ‘Every Day Was Getting Worse’

Cathi, 63, is in her third term as the mayor of Peshtigo. She’s the first woman to be mayor of the small town in northeastern Wisconsin, about eight miles from the border with Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. She loves the city.

One of the projects she’s most proud of is a fish-viewing pier — a years-long city endeavor that is mostly complete now, a platform extending out over the river behind the city’s paper mill. Plaques describe the fish you can see in the clear waters below. The city will celebrate the opening of the pier next year.

Cathi said she has no idea where she contracted the coronavirus.

In early July, Marinette County was averaging only eight or 10 new infections per day. Cathi wore a mask, and reminded others to wear one. But she also interacted with a lot of people in the course of her jobs, both as mayor and as an emergency medical technician. She’s naturally extroverted and energetic about what she’s working on.

“I’m a goer from morning till night,” she said.

That was part of what made it so obvious, when Cathi got sick in July, that something was very wrong. Her first symptom was fatigue. She slept until noon one day.

“I said, ‘If you don’t get up pretty soon, I’m going to call an ambulance,’” Carl said.

When she did get up, she was so weak that she fell on her way to the shower. He drove her to the emergency room, because Cathi didn’t want to endanger fellow EMTs.

“She was very sick,” said Carla Noel, a nurse in the intensive care unit of Aurora Medical Center-Bay Area. “I worried for her. She was needing a lot of oxygen, all the time.”

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Cathi said in her first weeks in the hospital, she knew she was getting sicker.

“Every day was getting worse,” she said. “They just couldn’t get it under control at first.”

The intensive care unit was not nearly as full in July as it would be only a few months later. But even in the summer, working in the COVID-19 unit was intense. Because of the necessities of COVID-19 precautions, and because of the duration of many patients’ stays, Noel said nurses had already become accustomed to forming close relationships with patients like Cathi.

“Their families are not there,” Noel said. “We’re taking care of them — not for two days, because they came in with something, and we got them better, and they’re out right away. A lot of these patients we’re seeing for three and four and five weeks at a time.”

Noel has been a nurse for 24 years and has worked in intensive care for 15, and the pandemic has been more intense and more demanding than anything she’s seen before. By November, she was working five 12-hour days every week. She’s had more frank conversations with families than ever before. She’s seen more patients die than ever before.

Every nurse has a feel for whether a patient is going to make it, Noel said. She was not at the hospital when Cathi was transferred to Green Bay’s Aurora BayCare Medical Center. But she knew Cathi’s lungs were so damaged there was a real chance that once she went on a ventilator, she would never come off it.

“Cathi truly is a fighter,” Noel said.

It didn’t always feel that way to Cathi.

“I want people to know this,” she said in a tearful interview. “I asked God to take me, because I couldn’t handle it. I couldn’t breathe. Everybody says, ‘Oh, you were so strong.’ I wasn’t. There were times when I was ready to go.”

Small-Town Support In A Critical Time

The man who drove the ambulance that took Cathi to Green Bay was a colleague and one of her best friends.

Patrick Barker has been an EMT for nearly 30 years. In the small cities they serve, he said it’s common to take care of people he knows, or at least is acquainted with. But he’s never had to take care of someone he’d worked with closely for most of his career.

“She was very critical,” Barker said. “Not staying focused was not an option.”

His presence that night helped Cathi feel better.

“When I saw him walking into the room, a calmness came over me,” she said. “We’ve been friends for so long, it put me at ease, knowing he was one of the ones taking me down.”

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The tone of an Aug. 11 story in the Marinette Eagle-Herald about Cathi’s illness shows how people tended to downplay the seriousness of the virus, or even its presence in the rural area. A City Council member confirmed to the paper that Cathi had been hospitalized but said she was “on the mend” and that he hoped she’d be out of the hospital the following week. He called the “rumors” that she had COVID-19 “not fair to her.”

But in a small town, people knew a lot more of the truth. Neighbors and friends sent food to Carl’s house. Everywhere he went, they asked about how Cathi was doing.

“The people in this town, they were praying,” said Carl, who retired from the paper mill this year. “Big cities are nice, but everybody knows you here. They helped all the time.”

That support meant a lot, Carl said. But he was in knots. Sometimes when he was allowed to visit her in the hospital in Green Bay, he’d find Cathi was unconscious. When she was still on the ventilator, they struggled to communicate — she couldn’t talk, and had to use paper and pencil. Once when he visited her, he said, she lacked even the strength to press the button that called the nurse.

“I felt very helpless,” Carl said. His son had moved back home over the summer. “We’d hug. And I said, ‘I don’t think Mom’s coming home.’”

‘Every Day I’m Getting Stronger’

It’s been an awful year for the Malkes.

In April, Cathi and Carl lost their 38-year-old daughter, who died after struggling with an alcohol addiction. The holidays would have been an intensely difficult time for the family no matter what. Even with the support of their other daughter, who lives nearby, and their son, Carl doesn’t know if he could have faced it without Cathi.

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In September, Cathi was well enough to be transferred from the hospital to Peshtigo’s Rennes West rehabilitation center. A convoy of Peshtigo’s police and fire vehicles, paramedic units and friends’ vehicles greeted her there, welcoming her. The Peshtigo Times published a photo of her being lowered out of a van in a wheelchair, arms reaching out for her 4-year-old granddaughter.

The whole time she was at Rennes, Carl visited her every day, through the window.

“Every day I’m getting stronger,” she told the Eagle-Herald on Oct. 1. Soon, she was continuing her rehabilitation at home. By the end of November, she was back to mayoral duties at City Hall, presiding over a city budget meeting that instituted a $40 user fee for recycling services.

“You can’t be too careful,” Carl wrote in an essay he shared with the Peshtigo Times. “This whole experience was very scary and threatening. … The message I’m trying to get across is to take all the precautions you can by wearing masks, social distancing and cleaning hands in public places. This COVID-19 virus is real. It has really scared my wife and me.”

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That fire, still the deadliest fire in American history, is part of Peshtigo’s story. Its 200-foot flames and 2,000-degree temperatures killed more than 2,000 people in the region. Eight-hundred people died in Peshtigo alone, and the city was reduced to ashes. A mass grave holds the remains of 350 people whose bodies could not be identified.

Today, there’s an historical marker and a fire museum, housed in the building of the first church built in the city after the fire. It’s closed to the public due to the pandemic. There’s a mural depicting it on the side of a downtown building.

“We were reborn from the ashes,” Cathi said.

That’s Cathi, too. She was leveled by her illness, and now she’s doing the hard work of rebuilding herself. She said she is “a work in progress.” By the time of the sesquicentennial, she hopes she’ll be as strong as she was before COVID-19.