Husband: Local nurse who died from COVID-19 did everything to avoid it

The husband of a local nurse who he said died from coronavirus said “she did everything she could not to get it.”

Tawauna Averette died earlier this week after battling coronavirus for over a month in the hospital. She worked as a nurse on the cardiac unit at Kettering Medical Center.

Before COVID-19 took her life, she gave life to a healthy baby girl.

“They didn’t want the baby to get it - they went ahead and delivered the baby six weeks early,” Tawauna’s husband Charles told News Center 7′s Sean Cudahy.

>>RELATED: Local nurse dies from COVID-19; leaves behind 7 children, friends and co-workers say

The little girl was her seventh child and now those children are without their mother.

“It was really hard telling them that she died,” Charles said. “She did any and everything for them all the time.”

“She tried to help a lot of people, even when she didn’t have stuff she needed, she tried to help people.”

It was an up-and-down battle for Tawauna while she was in the hospital. She was on a ventilator and her husband said just days before she passed it seemed like she was turning a corner.

Charles said everything started with what they thought was just a bad head cold. She was tested for COVID-19 at an urgent care in late October. Her illness got more serious when she started having breathing trouble, he said. That’s when she went to the hospital for help.

Her husband said Tawauna had been in the hospital for pneumonia previously, so they were already concerned about what would happen if she got the virus.

“We knew...she would be susceptible to it, but...it got her, " Charles said, adding that the family was taking every precaution they could to avoid it.

“(She) made sure we all had masks all the time,” Charles said. “She always made sure we had them on, made sure we had hand sanitizer, made sure the kids was washing their hands on the regular.”

After tragedy hit his family, now Charles wants others to know how serious the virus can be.

“I would just tell them from experience personally I know this is real,” he said. “If you’re not wearing a mask...to me it means you don’t care about anyone but yourself.”

Tawauna’s family has arranged a fundraiser to help give them the support they need to get through this holiday season.

Cox Media Group