‘Wasn’t her time.’ SC woman whose life stopped due to COVID returns home to new baby

The Chubb children had no idea who was waiting for them when they came home from school and day care earlier this week.

Their mother.

Cierra Chubb had seen her children only once in more than 100 days as she battled and actually died from COVID-19 complications in a Columbia hospital.

She was admitted to Prisma Health Richland on July 24, released after 95 days and left a rehabilitation hospital to go home to Lancaster Monday.

“We got our Cierra back,” her husband Jamal said Friday. “It’s just a little bit different.”

Different physically, he said, but in all other ways — the loving mother, the optimistic spirit, the joyful laughter — Cierra Chubb was there, sitting on the couch as her two older children ran to greet her. The baby, Myles, who Cierra gave birth to shortly after she was admitted to Prisma Health Richland, was nearby in a carrier held by his dad.

Jamal has posted regularly on video-making app TikTok and Facebook about his wife’s progress, including the homecoming and his wife leaving the hospital.

Jamal Chubb also appeared at a news conference in August at the request of hospital doctors to plead with people, and especially pregnant women, to get vaccinated.

Jamal Chubb said his wife is using a walker and struggles to breathe. Three steps leave her winded, he said.

Doctors told them Cierra has the most damaged lungs they’ve seen in anyone who lived. Her lungs get better, day by day. She does not intend to have a lung transplant. Her husband called such a transplant a death sentence.

Cierra Chubb was on a ventilator for 90 days and an ECMO, or extracorporeal membrane oxygenation, machine for 28 days. The EMCO machine puts oxygen in the blood outside the body, allowing the heart and lungs to rest. It is a last-ditch measure.

On Friday, Chubb talked about when the doctors said they had done all they could do for Cierra. She was essentially brain dead, her lungs destroyed. Time to call hospice. If she lived, the doctor said she’d be a vegetable, Jamal Chubb said.

Jamal said no.

He was not ready to let her go.

The life they had made with their 7-year-old daughter and 2-year-old son — and now a newborn — was too precious to stop fighting for.

He sat beside her hospital bed days on end, listening to her struggle to breathe. He held Myles and he prayed and he talked to loved ones and he never ceased believing the day would come when Cierra returned home.

Then one August day she woke up. She talked, she smiled. She was Cierra.

She faces many challenges and has a team of doctors tracking her progress, pulmonary, infectious disease, neurology. She has some nerve damage in her right foot. It’s getting better.

Jamal Chubb said he has seen three miracles. The first, of course, that his wife survived. The second is the miracle of the doctors, nurses and other hospital personnel who go to work every day and fight against the destruction that COVID-19 wrought.

The third is the outpouring of love and support his family has received from around the world, from friends as well as strangers.

Grieving people he’s met since Cierra was hospitalized have asked him why she made it and their loved one didn’t. He doesn’t have an answer.

“I don’t pretend to know God’s will,” he said. “It just wasn’t her time.”

This story was originally published November 12, 2021 at 12:18 PM.