The 88-year-old Spanish Couple Who Overcame Coronavirus Together

RIO DE JANEIRO, BRAZIL – It has now been 70 years since that day, at the festivals of Valdelageve (province of Salamanca, northwest Spain), when José Prieto Cerrudo climbed onto a mule. He had arrived in the village with his brother from Béjar, 30 kilometers away, to earn some money at the festivals.

He played the clarinet, and his brother the cymbals. José saw the mule and rode it to draw the attention of Guadalupe Matas Hernández, who had gone to the kermesse with a friend. “The mule’s name is Cana, and it’s mine,” she said. With the boy on top, the animal flung itself forward by lowering its head, and Jose flew out and fell to the ground.

So Guadalupe and Joseph met, and began to talk, first on walks, and then through letters, because Guadalupe, like many girls in the village, was employed by a family in Madrid, as a housemaid.

They finally got married in 1955, had their first daughter that year, then their second, then their third, and kept having babies waiting for the boy Jose wanted. “Look what you got for wanting a boy,” she told him one day. It was 1971. Guadalupe and Jose were the parents of seven girls.

The seven women (Maite, Rosi, Irene, María José, Pilar, Maika, and Bea) were on vigil until Monday, March 30th, when their parents left the hospital and were able to return to their home in Villanueva de la Torre (Guadalajara). Guadalupe and Jose are 88 years old (he will be 89 this month) and have overcome the coronavirus.

This at an age that Covid-19 has recorded in Spain a mortality rate of 22.2 percent, with the aggravating factor that Jose suffered a stroke in 2012 that left him with severe physical sequelae. It was he who sounded the alarm on March 4th, when he started coughing more than usual. “The next day I took him to the doctor and he prescribed antibiotics,” says Rosi, one of his daughters.

On March 8th, there was a large family celebration at the Prieto-Mata house: Guadalupe and Joseph celebrated their 65th wedding anniversary. He was still running a fever and a headache days later, despite the antibiotics. He went to the hospital in Alcalá, where it was decided to admit him to the Madrid Red Cross hospital. It was March 14th, a Saturday, the first day of confinement in Spain. He had tested positive for coronavirus.

In order not to be alone, Guadalupe moved to the house of one of her daughters in Madrid. There she began to develop the same symptoms as her husband and ended up being admitted to the Red Cross hospital, also positive for coronavirus.

The two were on different floors. “They missed each other, they don’t know how to be apart. My father, mostly. My father is very sensitive, he needs her to be with him,” says Rosi. Joseph asked, begged, for Guadalupe to remain in the same room. His doctor, Jesús Lacasa, agreed.

Generally, if one of the two patients (or both) is in a very critical condition, the doctors prefer not to put them together: the belief that one of them worsens and they have to separate them, plus the uncertainty of not knowing what is happening, is destructive. But that was not the case.

“When in different rooms, one keeps thinking about how one’s spouse is doing all the time. They are couples who have spent their whole lives together, they know that the other person is sick and they don’t even care about themselves, they only care about how the other person is, and not knowing is despairing. Our policy is to reunite them whenever their health condition, within their illness, does not entail risks.

In this case, Guadalupe was better and more active than Joseph, who was worse off. So much so that when they were able to discharge her, she replied that she would only leave with her husband.

Elderly people heal too. Most of them. But how is their return? “If you are a person who goes back to a family environment, or with your spouse, where nothing has changed, you will come back stronger and more joyful because you are going back to your environment. This is a very tough generation that has overcome a civil war, hunger, misery, the death of siblings…,” says the head of Geriatrics at the Red Cross Hospital, Javier Gómez Pavón.

His unit has discharged dozens of people in the last few days, some of them as old as 90.

Or even more. This is the case of Adoración González García, a woman from Sisterna (Asturias, northern Spain) who is 96 years old. The widow of Manuel Gavela and mother of three children, Ramón, Antonio and Mari Carmen. In good health, active, she did gymnastics until some years ago.

A few weeks ago she fell out of bed at the senior home in Meco, where she lives, and the small injury took her to the emergency room. There, after the examination, she tested positive for coronavirus. Among people over 90 years old, 26.7 percent of patients with this diagnosis die. Not Adoración, a woman who in 1948 migrated penniless from Asturias to Madrid with her husband, raised three children and learned the hairdressing trade to set up a salon on the outskirts of Extremadura, the ‘Peluquería Dora’.

She has seen a good part of the 20th century pass by and is witnessing the 21st. “Understand, we prepare for the worst. There was a certain probability that she would die. But she was always in good health, her exams were good. Our father also died an elderly man, at her age now,” says her son Ramón.

Adoración returned to her home and has been in quarantine since she was discharged, hoping she can be visited by her family. Her turn had not yet come.

El País interviewed Adoración in 2009 because that year she had been standing in store sales queues for six decades. “I, who am the oldest, would wake me up at five in the morning to go to the sales when I was very young. I remember warming up in line at the ‘Galerias Preciados’, always one of the first, by a bonfire improvised by others who were also waiting,” Ramón says.

José and Guadalupe, who now live confined in the upper floor of their house, went this Sunday to the window to pose for a photographer. “We also thought that things might not turn out well, especially for my father, who was already poorly. But it’s possible, of course: most can make it”, says his daughter Rosi.

When Joseph married Guadalupe, they moved into his parents’ house, where his eight brothers also lived. There were 12 living there. And he left for Madrid, recommended at the airport by his uncle; in Barajas airport he worked as a luggage handler and signalman. He also sold clothing throughout the towns, and sold gold.

“He worked all his life, whatever it took to support us, he worked outside and she worked inside, because Mama had to take care of us seven,” says Rosi, who recalls the advice she gives her parents at family lunches: “I always say that they should have stopped on the second one, which happens to be me. The third one says that, in her opinion, three would be the perfect number. The fourth believes that four would be enough…”.

Source: El País