Sen. Amy Klobuchar and her husband on Tuesday opened up about their battle with the coronavirus, calling the experience “one of the hardest things” someone could go through.
The former Democratic presidential candidate said she was stuck in Washington D.C. working on the since-passed coronavirus relief bill while her now-recovered law professor husband, John Bessler, was hospitalized in their home state of Minnesota.
“I’m on my own, and I’ve got to just keep calling and understand that the people in the hospital are doing the best they can,” Kobuchar told “NBC Nightly News.”
Bessler, who teaches at the University of Baltimore, said he began to feel ill on the morning of March 11, after teaching three classes the day before.
“It just suddenly hit me and I had a fever, and that fever just lasted for days and days,” Bessler told the outlet. “I’m 52, very healthy, and it just hit me.”
“This is not a cold,” he added. “You don’t get pneumonia when you get a cold. You don’t end up at the hospital on oxygen when you get a cold. This is really a serious thing.”
Bessler was released after about five days and then returned home to rest. During that time, Klobuchar said she called him every few hours to monitor his temperature.
She called the experience “one of the hardest, hardest things.”
“I can’t even imagine those families where they hear the opposite news, you know — after he’s there for five days, and it turns for the best,” Klobuchar said.
“There are people where it turns for the worse, and they’re on ventilators, or they don’t make it, and it’s a heartbreaking thing and it’s why we have to invest in testing and do everything to make up for the mistakes that were made at the beginning, where a country was not prepared for this,” she added.
The Minnesota lawmaker said she was not tested for the virus on the advice of her doctors.