Anybody who knows 5-year-old Rebekah Sullivan would understand the significance of the video her mother received on Monday at the North Carolina ICU where the girl’s father is fighting to regain enough strength for a double transplant to replace his COVID-ravaged lungs.
The video showed Rebekah in a pharmacy near her home with a Band-Aid on her right upper arm. A neighbor had just taken her to get a pediatric dose of the COVID vaccine. And she hates getting shots.
“It’s one of her big things,” her mother, Julie Sullivan, told The Daily Beast. “I remember when she was about to start school, she’s like, ‘I don’t want to go kindergarten, not if I have to get shots.’”
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But she had gone ahead last fall and gotten the immunizations that are standard at schools across the country. Her reward was that her 42-year-old father, retired Marine Master Sgt. Andrew “Sully” Sullivan, walked her to and from school every day.
The walks were also a reward for Sully, who had retired from the military after 24 years and a dozen deployments as an elite Marine sniper because he had missed too many such moments with his older children.
That perfect start and end to every school day would have continued had not Julie and Sully tested positive for COVID in January despite being fully vaccinated. Julie initially got sicker than Sully, but he gradually became increasingly ill, long after a two-week quarantine. He nonetheless continued the sweet twice-a-day ritual with Rebekah.
“But he got to where he would walk her to school and then he would sit on the couch and take a nap because it wore him out so much,” Julie later said.
Sully had also been taking Rebekah to dance class every Saturday. But on Saturday, March 12, he went instead to Camp Lejeune Medical Center, not far from their home.
Sully was immediately admitted and placed on as much oxygen as the facility could administer. Julie had returned just the day before from a funeral in California for an uncle who had become the third member of her extended family to die of the virus that now threatens to kill her husband.
“COVID has not been kind to our family,” Julie noted.
Sully continued to have such difficulty breathing that he was transported on an air ambulance to the University of North Carolina Medical Center in Chapel Hill. The medical team there quickly determined that he needed to be intubated.
“He kind of just kept fighting and fighting and fighting,” Julie recalled. “He did not want to get intubated at all.”
But the virus had trashed his lungs beyond repair. Julie watched the life drain from this man who had always been so healthy and strong, who had been an Eagle Scout growing up in upstate New York who had enlisted at 17 and become a highly decorated Marine’s Marine. The couple asked the lead doctor what would happen if he continued to refuse intubation.
“[The doctor] said, ‘If you don’t get intubated, we’ll give you pain medicine until you fall asleep and you’ll just pass away,” Julie recalled.
The doctor then posed a question.
“Is there any reason why you want to do that?”
Sully replied as someone who was just starting a new life. He had earned a bachelor’s degree in psychology in 2017 and he planned to get a master’s and specialize in assisting Marines and their families in coping with the psychological impacts of their calling. And there was so much more he wanted to do, not only with Rebekah, but also with her 3-year-old brother and the six older children, along with Julie. He answered as emphatically as he could while unable to talk and receiving high-flow oxygen.
“[Sully] had his mask on,” Julie recalled. “He was shaking his head, like, ‘Hell no!’”
Sully’s blood oxygen level remained perilously low even with intubation and the medical team immediately placed him on extracorporeal membrane oxygenation, or ECMO. He awoke with a large tube, or cannula, inserted through his neck into his jugular vein and down into his heart. His blood was now running through an artificial lung that removed carbon dioxide and infused it with oxygen. He was no longer struggling for each breath and he ceased to look scarily close to dying,
“It is really saving his life,” Julie said. “You see the color return to his face, the light return to his eyes. It was amazing.”
He longer had a breathing tube down his throat, so the doctors were able to bring him out of the deep sedation needed for intubation. He was further revived when Marines he had trained as snipers began coming from near and far to visit him. They were allowed in two at a time and called out “Sully!” He was unable to talk, but he held out both his hands to greet them.
“There were times when he would look at me and he looked kind of sad, but when he saw those guys, he looked so happy,” Julie said. “It was a game-changer. I think it was because he had been to hell and back with those guys.”
Sully and his Marines had gone through two decades of seemingly unending war that too many Americans seemed to forget. They now joined him in his fight for life as too much of the country imagined the pandemic was over.
“I think when he saw them it was like, ‘All right, we can do it, I’m going to hell and back, but I can do it.’”
One of the first Marine visitors half-jokingly told a nurse what to expect.
“He said, ‘Over the next several days, some of the most deadly men are going to be walking into this room. And the guy who trained them is lying right there. So, no pressure,’” Julie remembered.
One doctor acknowledged Sully’s service and voiced a determination to win this battle with this diabolical foe.
“He said, ‘It might sound like a lot of Hail Marys, but I’m pulling for you. You’ve given a lot for your country and we’re just trying to give something back,’” Julie recalled.
The next move in the battle was going to be a double transplant. But Sully would first have to build up his strength. He would need a feeding tube.
“No nutrition, no mission,” one of the Marines observed.
And there was something else Sully had to do if he wanted to be deemed strong enough to receive the lungs and a chance to resume his second life with its twice-daily reward.
“They wanted him up and walking,” Julie said. “The first day that he walked, he walked like five to 10 shuffling steps. The second day, he walked out his room and turned the corner. The third day, he walked out his room, turned the corner almost to the next room. So maybe 20, 25 feet.
The father who had delighted in walking his daughter to school now had to move along with all the ECMO machinery as well as a medical team that made sure the lines were secured while checking and adjusting his oxygen levels.
“That machine is huge,” Julie said. “It’s a big deal, but he was doing it.”
One day a week, Julie leaves the hospital and drives two and a half hours for an overnight at their home.
“I joke that I want to love on the kids, but it’s more like they are loving on me,” she reported. “Even my 14-year-old. I walked in the house and he ran up and hugged and kissed me or right smack on the mouth. Most times, I can’t even get him in the same room. Somebody might have missed me.”
Before Sully fell seriously ill, the mother of one of Rebekah’s classmates died. That had prompted Julie and Rebekah to have talks about the loss of a family member. And that seemed to have helped prepare Rebekah for whatever might happen with her father.
“She's been handling it with ridiculous amounts of maturity and love,” Julie said. “She keeps saying things like, ‘I'm going to just keeping thinking of all my happy memories of Daddy.’”
Julie added, “Little girls 5 years old are not supposed to be thinking about things like that.”
Julie told the girl who hates shots that she would need to get one more.
“I explained to her that Daddy's sick and that when he's able to see people that they have to have the vaccine—so that we needed to get it right away,” Julie called.
Rebekah immediately understood.
“She said she would be brave,” Julie reported.
Julie did not want her daughter to get the jab at just some random spot, so she made an appointment for this past Monday at a place she trusts, and a neighbor agreed to take the girl.
On Sunday night, Julie tucked Rebekah and the other kids in bed and did a load of laundry and headed back to spend the week with Sully. Instead of stopping at the hotel where she had been sleeping during the week, she headed straight to the hospital, arriving around 2 a.m.
“I went straight to check on him,” she recalled. “He was wide awake and he asked me to stay. So I pulled up my chair and held his hand and stayed by his side.”
She was still there when the doctors came in for the morning rounds. They would later suggest that an elevated white blood cell count might explain why Sully did not extend his daily walk even further. He instead just stood by the bed, marching in place. She wondered if he had previously pushed himself too hard
“Not a good day,” Julie said.
But things brightened when she checked her phone and saw the video of brave Rebekah at the pharmacy, with a Band-Aid on her upper arm.
“Moving around and dancing so it wouldn’t get sore,” Julie said.
Rebekah had indeed been brave, in the way of a Marine’s Marine, in the way we all should be, overcoming her fear out of love.
