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After being hospitalized for weeks with a life-threatening rare form of pneumonia, Mary Lou Retton, 55, was able to spend Christmas at home.
The Olympic icon spent a month in a Texas hospital in the fall, according to her family. During her hospitalization, she said, she was close to death.
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“I am blessed to be here, because there was a time when they were about to put me on life support,” Retton told NBC’s Hoda Kotb in an interview on the Today show, while sitting on her couch at home with her oldest daughter, Shayla Schrepfer.
Retton said she was supposed to meet her daughters at a football game in Dallas but was too ill to leave home.
“I literally was laying on my bedroom floor,” she said. “I didn’t know what was wrong with me. I couldn't breathe.”
Luckily, she said, a neighbor noticed a car door left open in her driveway. The neighbor went to tell Retton that it was open, found her and took her to an emergency room, where she was admitted and diagnosed with pneumonia.
She was sent home, but the next day, Schrepfer found her nearly unresponsive and took her to another hospital. Her oxygen levels were dangerously low. Doctors told the family that Retton’s life was in grave danger.
“They were saying their goodbyes to me,” an emotional Retton told Kotb.
Retton explains why she was uninsured
On Oct. 10, Retton’s daughters disclosed that their mother had been in an intensive care unit for more than a week, “is not able to breathe on her own” and is “fighting for her life.” The daughters said their mother didn’t have health insurance.
After the family set up a fundraising site to help pay Retton’s medical bills, donations poured in, reaching more than $459,000. “When COVID hit and after my divorce and all my preexisting [conditions] — I mean, I’ve had over 30 operations, orthopedic stuff — I couldn’t afford it,” Retton said. “But who would even know that this was going to happen to me?”
After several weeks in the hospital, Retton began to heal. Doctors said she was well enough to go home.
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