COVID: Ex-mayor of Muncie learning to walk again

Republican former mayor urges vaccination

Alan K. Wilson | Photo by Seth Slabaugh

MUNCIE — Before he got sick with what he thought was just a sinus infection last Thanksgiving, Alan Wilson had been working as a public defender for juveniles, composting leaves, biking around the Westridge neighborhood, singing in the church choir, and shopping in hardware stores.

The illness turned out to be COVID-19, a severe case, and the 79-year-old former Muncie mayor (1980-83) has been unable to walk since the infection sent him to the hospital in early December.

When I visited him recently, Wilson, who's lucky to be alive — a doctor called it divine intervention — had not lost his sense of humor, and he remained his old friendly and good-natured self.

"The therapy, whew," he said during an interview from his bed in a skilled-care section of Westminster Village retirement community. "They wear T-shirts that say 'Westminster Therapy.' And I said it should say 'West Monster Therapy.' Oh my, they push me hard. But they're great gals. They tease me and I tease them back."

A wheelchair transports the attorney from his bed to a therapy room where, not long ago, it took four therapists pulling and tugging to get him up to a  standing position at the parallel bars. Now it's just one therapist hanging on as he learns to walk again.

"I'm not at the walking stage yet at all," Wilson said in a raspy voice on Aug. 17. "Last week, they said they wanted me to stand up and sit back down, and do that five times. OK. That's hard but do-able. Then they said do it five more times. So I struggled to do it. Darned if they didn't say now do it five more times." 

By Sept. 5, he could walk 25 feet with a walker.

Because of how much time he's spent in bed, his muscles wasted away. At first, Wilson couldn't hold his head up in his wheelchair for more than a minute.

It was a trip through hell to get this far, but he doesn't remember much of it.

Within a week of Thanksgiving, Wilson stopped eating and drinking. He became a new person after an ambulance crew came to his home and gave him breathing treatments, but that didn't last. His oxygen level soon crashed again and he was hospitalized at IU Health Ball Memorial Hospital on Dec. 5, which is the last time his wife Beverly would see him, except on video, for a long time.

A day later, Wilson was moved to intensive care — where he remained for about five weeks — and placed on a ventilator. He got a feeding tube down his throat. He was put in a medically induced coma. Other treatments included plasma therapy.

His three children, from Central and Southern Indiana and Colorado, rallied home to Muncie and found one of the last Christmas trees at Lowe's. 

But the children only visited their father virtually. "We could see him, but he couldn't do much on his own," Beverly said. "He waved his fingers a little bit but I'm not sure he knew it was us."

"I don't remember this at all," Wilson told me.

In January, he was moved to a speciality unit in the hospital but remained on a ventilator. He couldn't move his arms or legs or sit up. Then he experienced a "traumatic catheter insert."

In a brief phone conversation with Beverly, the doctor sounded scared. "He said he was bleeding," she said.

Beverly:"Are you giving him blood?" 
Doctor: "Lots." 
Beverly: "Like four units?"
Doctor: "We're pumping it in."

Alan K. Wilson’s view from Westminster Village | Photo by Seth Slabaugh

Later, after the bleeding was stopped, "they got a blood clot out the size of your fist," Beverly said. "We had lots of scary moments like that. The nurse said COVID is a disease that has so many ups and downs, like a roller coaster."

On Feb. 9, Wilson was released to a local nursing home (not Westminster) for physical therapy.

He complained that it hurt when he tried to take a couple of steps. His wife assumed the pain was in his arthritic knees, but he told her it hurt everywhere. "That's not the answer I was expecting," Beverly went on. "We're learning a lot about long haulers. This is not something we've ever seen before. I know the CDC (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention) early on kept flip-flopping on things. And I understand why now, as more evidence comes in. They're learning. We're all learning."

Wilson's therapy at the first nursing home was good, but nobody knew enough, Beverly said. As a result, he passed out twice during therapy.

"The second time it happened, he was standing up, then all of a sudden he was lying down and looking up and people were yelling, 'Can you breathe?' They thought he wasn't trying hard enough, but he just wasn't ready for that much therapy." 

Wilson was not injured but ended up back in the hospital for five days. He had collapsed during therapy, as it turned out, because of an infection that had led to sepsis, a potentially life-threatening condition.

Then it was back to the same nursing home, where family members waded in snow to visit Wilson through the window of his room (to which he was quarantined after an assistant therapist with whom he had come in close contact tested positive for COVID).

"He had his cell phone but he couldn't open it," Beverly said of the family's attempts to communicate through the window. "It's a flip phone, by choice. His right hand didn't work. So he tried to use his left hand. Then he was trying to get it open with his teeth or what-not. Whether we got to talk to him was the luck of the draw."

Wilson is just now regaining the use of his right hand.

During my visit, he reaches for that phone to call his wife, who's running late, but he can't find it. I call the number and the phone rings somewhere down the hall. A staff member answers and says it was left on his food tray. "Good grief," says Wilson.

When I ask what kind of dog is Peanut, who enters the room with Beverly, Wilson talks about "an illicit canine affair" between "whatever" breeds.

Before long, Wilson's paralegal enters the room, with paperwork from the Indiana Supreme Court notifying him that he has been removed from the roll of attorneys licensed to practice law in Indiana. Because of his illness, he couldn't keep up with continuing education requirements, so he resigned "before they put me on the bad-boy list." He was first licensed in 1968. 

"I think Jack Quirk is still doing some stuff, but everybody else in our age group, there were eight of us, is kaput," Wilson said of fellow members of the local bar, citing Jon Moll, Judge Dick Dailey, Dick Hughes, the late Geoffrey Rivers, the late Mary Louise Baker, Joe Speece, and himself.

You no longer see Wilson biking through northwest Muncie, but Moll still jogs there. "I've almost run over him a couple of times; he runs so slowly," Wilson said, thinking back to last year. "But he's moving," Beverly chimed in.

In addition to maintaining a private practice, Wilson spent decades in public service: as a U.S. Navy Judge Advocate General's Corps defense service officer, a deputy prosecutor, a public defender, a brief term on the bench and one term as Muncie's mayor. He defeated former police chief and ex-Sheriff "Big Jim" Carey in a 1979 mayoral campaign that was examined in the public-television documentary "Middletown," which include footage of Wilson singing in the church choir. Carey, a Democrat, returned the favor in a rematch four years later.

In addition to holding a law degree from Indiana University, Wilson earned an engineering degree from Purdue University.

He got sick  before COVID vaccines were available but has since been vaccinated, as has Beverly, who suffered a mild case of the disease.

"I can't believe these people who won't get vaccinated," said Wilson, who's lost 40 pounds. "You know I've been a lifelong Republican, but how these Trump people can get politics mixed in with their vaccination beliefs I don't know."

He quoted a vaccinated massage therapist who was told by an anti-vaxxer that "it's too bad you got vaccinated because you'll be dead within 90 days."

"Absolutely you should get vaccinated if you haven't been," Wilson said. "(Westminster Chaplain) Ron Naylor, when he meets someone out here or anywhere who is not vaccinated and is hesitant, he says, 'Go out to Westminster-Bristol room 34 and talk to the guy there, and he'll tell you about COVID."

A member of Masterworks Chorale, a group of singers that performs in the community, and also a member of the choir at First Presbyterian Church, Wilson doesn't know if he will be able to sing again. His vocal cords were damaged when they put tubes down his throat.

But a bigger concern is walking.

"Once I can walk, well then I can go home," he said. "I'm trying to get back to life the way it was before Thanksgiving Day. Boy have there been problems since then, ugh."