Erroll Windon is grateful to be alive, and he credits the COVID vaccine with saving him.
Windon, 71, was already fully vaccinated when he contracted COVID-19, and the road through to the other side proved harrowing.
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Windon had to be hospitalized in Baton Rouge at Our Lady of the Lake Medical Center, eventually getting moved to the ICU at the facility during his 10-day stay. Windon talked to WDSU-TV about his battle with the coronavirus.
"When I first got here, the oxygen was not working.
They had to move me to ICU," he said. "They said you will probably have to go on a ventilator. I said, 'No doc, I want to talk to my wife.' He said 'Call her right now.'"
Windon suffers from high blood pressure and is borderline diabetic, according to members of his family, and they worried he wouldn’t survive his hospital stay.
"When I heard, it made my heart dropped. But deep in my heart, I felt this vaccine will give him a fighting chance," his daughter Stacey Windon-Matthews said.
According to Windon’s doctor, it did.
"He said 'That vaccine kept you alive. It was fighting for you,'" Windon said. And now his family has something to say to the unvaccinated masses.
"We feel that the vaccine coupled with his faith, our faith, and prayer gave him a fighting chance," Windon-Matthews said.
"People take the flu shot and all of these other shots. We do not know what is in them but they help. If you can get vaccinated, which is really easy now. Do it. It saved my father-in-law and I feel it gives me a sense of protection," said Windon's son-in-law Kenneth Matthews, Jr.
