Kinston man uses near-death experience with COVID-19 to push others to get the vaccine

After making his miraculous recovery, Bob Dawson is committed to paying it forward.

“I was a 61-year-old man,” Dawson said. “Healthy, I had no issues, and it struck me down to death’s door.”

Dawson was working in Las Vegas in early December when he started getting a cough.

A trip to the hospital for a test confirmed it: Dawson had the coronavirus.

“The doctor told me by the 10th day, you’ll either be better or that’ll be the worst,” Dawson said. “Well, he was right. On December 18, I crashed.”

Dawson lost consciousness, ending up in the hospital’s intensive care unit.

When his wife, Laura, arrived in Nevada from their home in Kinston, doctors prepared her for what would come next.

“They told her that I, in fact, was going to die,” Dawson said. “That I only had a 2% chance to live.”

Doctors told the family that if Dawson did manage to recover, he would almost certainly have brain damage from weeks of low oxygen intake.

In February, the family decided to send Dawson, still in his hospital bed, on a private jet to a hospital in Rocky Mount. They thought that bringing him home would either help his recovery, or make it easier to prepare for his funeral.

“I said, ‘Dear Lord, I can’t take this pain,’” Dawson said. “’You take me home, I’m ready to die.’”

But weeks later, Dawson defied the odds, waking up in his hospital bed after being unconscious for more than two months.

After nearly a month of physical therapy, he’s still reliant on oxygen and a laundry list of medication to get him through the day, but he’d regained the ability to get around with a walker.

“God had his hand in my life to return me back to some form of normalcy,” he said.

Dawson’s next challenge is one he chose as a result of that recovery. He’s been using his struggle against the virus to motivate people to get their COVID vaccine, even going so far as to stop strangers in the street to ask them if they’ve been vaccinated yet.

“If you have concerns about getting vaccinated, then you need to really rethink it,” Dawson said. “Look at me sitting here with oxygen, struggling to talk.”

“If it can do it to me, it can do it to you,” he continued.

Dawson credits his faith with getting him through the last six months – and giving him a new calling.

“If it keeps one person from going through what I’ve been through, what my family has been through, that would be a blessing,” Dawson said.

Dawson said he eventually planned to make a full recovery from COVID-19, no matter how long it would take.