It’s been more than three months since Donnie Bruce landed in the emergency room at Kaiser Santa Teresa in San Jose with the coronavirus, but ski buddies continue to check in with texts and Facebook messages.
“They still call me, ‘Man, you alright? You OK?’” the 69-year-old Hollister retiree said. “I tell them, ‘I’m fine, I’m fine.’”
Many of them are survivors, too. Bruce was one of the dozens of members of the National Brotherhood of Skiers — the largest group of black skiers in the country — to end up battling the deadly virus after a group ski trip to Sun Valley, Idaho. At least four members who went on the trip, all from California, died. Now, the brotherhood has pulled closer together, united not only by decades of friendship but by the pandemic that upended their lives.
“Since I’ve been going through this,” Bruce said, “I look for God to protect me. I believe he moves in mysterious ways that we don’t really understand.”
The summit in Sun Valley was held as February turned to March, before shelter orders and social distancing mandates became the law of the land and when the dangers of COVID-19 were still largely a mystery. Bruce remembers deliberately washing his hands after greeting a skier from Seattle because he’d seen a news report about the disease reaching Washington state.
But other than that, he said, “I didn’t think anything of it.”
At first, it was his heart that would land Bruce in an Idaho hospital. The retired data engineer began experiencing chest pains in Sun Valley after a day of cross-country skiing and originally chalked it up to muscle soreness. But several days of intense back pain, two hospitals, and a helicopter ride later, Bruce woke up with new stents in his heart.
“I thought I was going to bite it,” he recalled.
Bruce felt weak after the trip home to San Benito County. But his wife of 38 years, Zeffie, reminded him he’d just been through a major operation. That was around March 7. On March 12, she’d return to find her diabetic husband passed out on the floor, blood sugar dangerously low. Paramedics wouldn’t take him all the way to Kaiser in South San Jose so Zeffie loaded him into the car and drove him the 50 miles north herself.
“It seemed like all hell broke loose,” Bruce said. “I had no idea what was going on.”
No visitors. Doctors in full protective gear. With testing in the early stages and supplies short, confirmation would take days. But it would reveal that he’d contracted the coronavirus, likely on the ski trip. One of his friends from the trip would end up in the hospital room next door. Unlike Bruce, he wouldn’t make it home.
In a message on the website of the group (which is co-ed despite its name), president Henri Rivers lamented the toll of the virus, acknowledging the deaths of Nathaniel Jackson and Charles Jackson, members of a Los Angeles ski club, Julia Alexander, a member of a Pasadena club, and Haymon Jahi, who had served as president of both the national group and San Jose’s Fire and Ice Ski Club.
“We have lost four friends, four comrades, four people we loved,” Rivers wrote.
Founded in the 1970s with the aim of putting a black athlete on the U.S. Ski Team, the National Brotherhood of Skiers has grown to more than 3,000 members across the country, with the broader mission of supporting athletes of color and increasing participation in winter sports.
The virus has hit African-Americans especially hard. According to the COVID Racial Data Tracker, a partnership between the COVID Tracking Project and the Antiracist Research and Policy Center, black people make up about 13 percent of the U.S. population but roughly a quarter of all coronavirus deaths where race is known.
In California, where blacks make up six percent of the population, they account for 10 percent of coronavirus deaths. Medical experts say the disparity is the result of a number of factors, including systemic racism. Blacks are disproportionately likely to hold jobs that require them to leave the house for work, from driving buses to custodial jobs. Blacks are also less likely than whites to have health insurance and access to good health care.
While Bruce has insurance through the health care giant, he’s upset others are forced to go without.
“This country doesn’t actually deal with the masses on a health care plan, but I really feel like any civilized country should look into that. Everybody needs good health,” he said.
Despite fighting heart issues and diabetes on top of the coronavirus, Bruce would become one of the lucky ones in the battle against the deadly disease.
As his wife — “my rock” — self-quarantined at home, Bruce battled a stubbornly high fever, disorienting hallucinations and bad coughing spells that nearly consumed his ability to talk, although he doesn’t remember the latter. Needing more and more oxygen, hospital workers moved him to the intensive care unit for closer observation.
“We didn’t know which way he was going to go,” said Christina Umphrey, a doctor who treated Bruce at Kaiser in San Jose.
On the phone, Zeffie told the doctor her husband was outgoing, extroverted, active. But that wasn’t the person Umphrey saw.
“He really just seemed kind of broken, his spirit was broken,” she said. “I was meeting a shell of a man, I really was.”
So Umphrey did something unusual. As she prescribed medicine and monitored his vitals, she also asked him to write about his plans for after he recovered, in a notebook she brought to his bedside.
“I felt like we were losing him,” she said. “I felt like the fight was going out of him and one thing we know about COVID-19, you have to fight. You have to be a fighter.”
Slowly, Bruce improved.
“He said, ‘I’m going to have a steak.’ I said, ‘You’ve earned it. You make those plans,’” Umphrey recalled. “You plan for vacations next year. You have to have something to look forward to.”
Finally, 12 days after he arrived, after his fever broke and his oxygen levels stabilized, Bruce went home to Zeffie.
“I went out of there waving like Miss America,” he chuckled. “I was so excited to go home. I didn’t know she was going to be Nurse Ratched,” the heartless antagonist in “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.”
His new reality would be Beyond Burgers instead of steak. Deep breathing exercises. Increasingly long walks. Gardening. Tree trimming. Ordinary life.
“It was wild,” Bruce said, “but I enjoyed it because that’s true love when somebody is very serious about your health.”
