An unvaccinated Coast nurse died of COVID. Her loved ones want to warn vaccine skeptics.
Operating room nurse Becky Clemens had a running joke with some of her coworkers at Singing River Gulfport Hospital.
“She would always brag that her husband was like almost a real-life scientist,” said fellow Singing River nurse and close friend Tyler Ann Kelley.
The Pass Christian resident was famously proud of her family, especially her husband of 26 years, a test engineer at John C. Stennis Space Center.
So at Becky Clemens’ funeral, Kelley and a few other graduates of Mississippi Gulf Coast Community College’s nursing program wore custom-made scrub caps with rockets on them as they performed a Nightingale Tribute, a ceremony to honor fallen nurses.
Clemens lost her battle with COVID-19 on Aug. 17. She was 48, in generally good health, but not vaccinated.
“She was an amazing nurse,” said Kelley, an Emergency Room nurse. Whenever Clemens had free time in the operating room, she would come down to the ER to help out, especially as the unit filled with COVID patients.
“Even when she would come down here just to help, she could light up the room with her smile. She was just a the goofiest, funniest person.”
Clemens loved travel and loved the beach, but she loved her children the most, said her husband Jonathan. Thomas, 21, attends Mississippi State University while Emily, 19, goes to Louisiana State University.
The family got to go to Disney one last time this year, which they frequented when the children were younger.
“We’ve been very close to our kids our whole life. She loved taking family trips together, any kind of travel, but especially with the kids too. When the kids were younger we went to Disney a lot, it was around this past Christmas we went, it was the first time we went in a few years. It was fun to think about when they were little,” Jonathan said in an interview with the Sun Herald.
“She was a great nurse, a great teacher, a great wife, but above everything she was a great mom.”
A beloved member of the Coast
Hailing from a “large, Coast Catholic family,” Becky grew up in DeLisle as the youngest of six children. Now an active parishioner at Holy Family in Pass Christian, Becky’s friends and husband said her faith was a defining attribute of her life.
Recently, Clemens traveled to the Holy Land, a trip she had always wanted to make.
“My favorite thing about her is how religious she is. I mean, she always related everything. And was so positive about it, which would bring you such peace and even difficult or easy situations because she was so uplifting and any and everything she said,” Kelley said.
“Even when I was at my lowest, she’s always there.”
Clemens’ funeral, held at Holy Family, was “packed” with “not a seat available” and live streamed on the parish’s website. Jonathan said their extensive group of family, friends, coworkers and four priests were at the services.
Kelley and Clemens go back about six years — when Clemens went back to school after a brief stint as a surgical technician at Gulf South Surgery Center, Kelley was in her nursing program at MGCCC.
Both Clemens and Kelley worked at Sterling Surgical Center in Slidell before settling at Singing River Hospital in Gulfport. Before working in the medical field, Clemens was a school teacher DeLisle Elementary and East Hancock Elementary School. She loved working with children.
Kelley, now 24, had been a young mom when the two were in school.
“At times she was almost like a mom to me…That’s how much of an impact she made on my life. I mean, when we were in nursing school, I was a single mother. And I can remember she would come over and we would study and we would take turns walking my daughter — because she was six months old at the time — and read off the notes to each other,” Kelley said.
“There’s not enough words in this world to say how grateful I was to have known her or had to have had her in my life or my daughter’s life. And she will be missed so much.”
Clemens’ long battle with COVID
Jonathan, like a scientist, sifted through his notes to make sure he could relate every date of Becky’s COVID journey correctly.
She began her symptoms on July 27, he said. At the time, he had COVID himself and was quarantining out in his air-conditioned shop.
“We took the quarantine really serious, both the kids were home from school in the house, and she was there,” Jonathan said. “The first day I came back in I said, ‘How you’re coughing right now is worse than anything I had.’ I had a mild case.”
Jonathan had the Pfizer vaccine back in early June.
The couple drove to her hospital and waited for care in the ER on July 31 because her symptoms were worsening.
Clemens had tightness in her chest and a deep cough, but the overwhelmed health care system was too full to admit her, Jonathan said. They sent her home after a ten-hour wait with an oxygen meter, bottle and orders to get a monoclonal antibody infusion the following Monday.
But by Monday, Clemens was too sick to get the infusion. So at about noon, Jonathan called the ambulance so his wife could get to the emergency room again.
“Of course if they didn’t have a shortage of beds, they probably would have admitted her,” he said. “It was a bad luck on timing, it was a weekend, we could have got the infusion the next day, and the hospitals are crowded, generally in normal times if you have to be admitted you get admitted.”
This time, the hospital admitted her into the emergency unit. Her condition worsened though she was on a bipap machine — in three days she had to be intubated. She got up to the intensive care unit two days after that, on Aug. 6.
“She was in a bad way. She looked like someone who had run the 100 yard dash even though she had almost pure oxygen being pushed into her lungs. She was almost hyperventilating,” Jonathan said.
“Initially she did not want to be intubated because she’s familiar with all that. She’s worked in the hospitals and all. You don’t know you’re going to get through it so she didn’t want to do that …but you can imagine trying to catch your breath for three days.”
Kelley agreed that it was difficult to get Clemens to agree she should be intubated. Her nurse was finally able to talk her into it.
Singing River Pulmonologist Dr. Ijlal Babar said that patients have about a 50% survival rate once put on a ventilator.
“She had been pushing off being ventilated for a few days just because she was so scared, we know how sick these patients are,” Kelley said.
Before she got on the ventilator, Clemens was able to call her husband and kids and tell them she loved them. That’s the last time they heard from her.
When Clemens got up to the ICU, Jonathan was able to see his wife during visiting hours. He navigated his wife’s illness with an incredible eye for detail.
“I was going every day and writing down the ventilator numbers and asking all the questions I could,” Clemens said. “You could go in and stand at the glass door and see her. I would go inside and ask questions, I tried to educate myself about the ventilator and all. Just to get a feel for what was going on.”
The last few days of Clemens life, her doctor was honest with Jonathan about her deteriorating health. Her kidneys were failing and her heart rate and blood pressure were wavering.
“It was just terrifying. Every step of this whole thing, you keep thinking, well this is not good, but this is as bad as it will be and we’ll come back from this, right?”
Vaccinations could curb future loss
Kelley decided to get vaccinated last Wednesday, the day after her friend passed away.
“[Getting vaccinated] was 100% because of her, only because I would rather take the risk and have some, you know, God forbid, complication from a vaccine than suffer what she had to go through or have my family members have to go there,” Kelley said.
Clemens had held off on getting vaccinated because she had Hashimoto’s, an autoimmune thyroid disorder, and a gluten allergy. Her doctor recommended she wait until later to get her shot, her husband said.
“She was still so healthy… she was an extremely, very, very active person,” Kelley said. “The only thing that we can do at this point is is prevention. And the only thing that’s giving us some sort of hope is the vaccine, which is why I’ve realized that importance of it. You know, it really is our only hope at this point.
“If this is the only answer we have right now, then what do we have to lose? I mean, there’s nothing.”
Jonathan, too, hopes that his wife’s experience with COVID can push the Coast to get their shot. Health officials unanimously agree that the surest way to prevent COVID is through the vaccine. If a breakthrough case occurs, like Jonathan’s, health officials confirm that sickness is much more mild than unvaccinated cases.
‘I’m an engineer so I’m technical with everything. I’m in the space program so we do risk assessments. Are people really evaluating the risk by the current situation?” he said.
“I think if you weigh the risk of having COVID and getting significant symptoms versus the risk of going to get this vaccine, it’s over a year now, and just in America you’ve had over 350 million shots given. If you really think about the risk of the two options, I think for most people it makes sense to go get the vaccine.”
Jonathan also said that his experience with his wife’s COVID has made him encourage people to act more swiftly when they may have symptoms.
“Don’t sit at home for three, four days thinking you’ll be OK. Be proactive. And we were proactive…if you’re having significant symptoms, go get the PCR test. Really be diligent,” he said.
“And everybody wear a mask. I would love for our country to act more like our health care workers. All they want to do is help, they’re not bickering or arguing… I think if they hung out in the hospital for a few weeks they might have a much more humble perspective about all this.”
This article is supported by the Journalism and Public Information Fund, a fund of the Gulf Coast Community Foundation.
This story was originally published September 8, 2021 at 5:50 AM.
