Elijah Ross-Rutter and his five other siblings said goodbye to their mom using a walkie-talkie before she lost her battle against coronavirus.
Fourth-oldest child Ross-Rutter told BuzzFeed News: “I told her I love her… she shouldn’t worry about the kids.”
42-year-old Sundee Rutter, a breast cancer survivor and single mother of six, passed away from COVID-19. Her children, sister and mother were outside the hospital room and bid farewell via walkie talkie.
She was recovering from breast cancer when she tested positive for coronavirus.
During her chemotherapy, she was able to have her children by her side. But with the deadly virus, she could only communicate with them via a handheld radio device.
Ross-Rutter said he was allowed to see his mom with a face mask on. However, the hospital decided to completely isolate her. “Like, I’m about to lose my best friend and she can’t even hear me,” he expressed.
He said that it was on March 3 when his mother first visited Providence Regional Medical Center in Washington. They spent 8 hours in a sealed room with hospital workers coming in and out wearing protective suits.
“They don’t even want to touch my mom,” said 20-year-old Ross-Rutter. “She thought she had the flu. But like, the coronavirus? It was kind of hard for us to understand how she could get it because not that many people had it around here.”
There were only 27 confirmed cases of coronavirus at that time in Washington state.
Four days later, on March 7, Rutter returned to hospital and Ross-Rutter was told by a doctor that his mother had to stay overnight as she had pneumonia. The next day, Rutter was diagnosed with coronavirus.
“For a while, she was able to text,” the 20-year-old told BuzzFeed News. But text message eventually turned into only emoji responses.
“She was sending me hearts on the messages but she wasn’t replying,” he shared.
On March 16, doctors told the family to come to the hospital. She passed away that afternoon.
Jessica Harris, Rutter’s friend, told BuzzFeed News: “She had already beat [cancer] and was trying to get her life back and then this happened. She’s a fighter, she did not seem to let it bother her at all.”
Rutter’s children described her as ‘kind, beautiful, caring and goofy.’ “She would also love when we would teach her the new dance moves that were trending,” Ross-Rutter said. “She really loved music.”
He added: “She was a supermom, you know?”
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