Mary Lou Retton Is Grateful to Be Alive After Month in ICU Following Rare Pneumonia Diagnosis
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Mary Lou Retton says she’s “blessed” and “grateful” to be alive after being diagnosed with a rare form of pneumonia that put her in the ICU and had her children at one point “saying their goodbyes to me.”
The former U.S. Olympic gymnast and gold medalist opened up about a near-deadly health scare that saw her nearly put on life support. It was an ordeal made all the more challenging by Retton’s lack of insurance.
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During a 10-minute sit down with Today‘s Hoda Kotb, Retton revealed that following a divorce, and more than 30 orthopedic surgeries and other conditions classified by insurance as pre-existing, she was unable to afford her own health care as she was struck with a still unidentified form of pneumonia that saw her family and medical team discussing putting her on a ventilator.
“I mean, when you face death in the eyes — I have so much to look forward to,” she said after making it through her medical emergency. “I’m a fighter, and I’m not going to give up. I have no idea what the future holds for me. I don’t know if I’m going to have lasting issues with my lungs. They don’t know. I wish I had answers, but I would never give up. It’s not in me.”
Retton, who at one point got emotional while discussing the support she received after believing herself to be “a washed-up old athlete,” expressed that there “were so many more positives than negatives” that are easier to see “now that I’m alive, and I made it through.”
The U.S. Olympian, now 56, was using oxygen during her sit down with Kotb, and told Today she did not remember much of her month-long hospital stay, which is why she had one of four daughters, Shayla Schrepfer, by her side. In fact, when she was initially hospitalized — the first of two stays — she didn’t remember the entire experience.
Following slurred speech that she chocked up to dehydration, Retton was found alone, lying on her bedroom floor and struggling to breathe, by a neighbor who noticed the door to one of her cars had been left open.
That was just a day after the former gymnast had gotten her nails done with her eldest daughter, Schrepfer, and showed signs of being very out of breath. “I was feeling tired, but I’m thinking, I turn 56 this month,” she recalled of the day before she was found looking “white or blue.”
But that first trip to the hospital would result in the team sending her home just a “couple of days” after diagnosing her with pneumonia, with Retton’s daughter sharing that “it wasn’t being taken as seriously as I think that it was.”
“It was a bad experience,” Retton recounted. “I wasn’t being treated.”
The very next day is when the mother and former athlete was found “almost unresponsive,” and rushed to a larger hospital in a nearby city, where they found “her oxygen levels were dangerously low and dropping.” The ordeal saw Retton in the hospital for a month, with the doctors only considering her release after Mary Lou’s lungs began to heal enough following a successful treatment of having high flow oxygen pumped through her nose.
“She told me, you need to get your sister [Emma Jean] here because we don’t know if she’s going to make it through the night. So, McKenna and I, we put her hands on her, and we said a prayer,” Schrepfer recalled. “I just remember loving on you and giving you a hug and McKenna kept saying things like, ‘It’s OK, you can go.'”
“They were saying their goodbyes to me,” a tearful Retton added.
Retton stressed the road ahead was long, and she wasn’t sure for how much longer she’d need the oxygen. But she will have her medical costs covered, thanks to donations to her GoFundMe, which was set up by her daughters. “We were just thinking, if she pulls through, the last thing we want her to have to think about is paying off these bills,” Schrepfer told Hotb.
Having raised nearly $460,000 as of the time of the interview, Retton says she has since been able to purchase insurance. “I’m very private and to come out and talk about it — usually my interviews are ‘Oh, yes, it felt great to win the Olympics. This is different. This is serious and this is life,” she said. “And I am so grateful to be here. I am blessed to be here.”
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