The Rev. Timothy Cole of Christ Church Georgetown told The Washington Post about his journey of battling the novel coronavirus. (Video: The Washington Post)

The Rev. Timothy Cole’s fever was spiking again, and his white blood cell count was surging.

The first known covid-19 patient in the District of Columbia had been hospitalized for 18 days, hooked up to an oxygen tank at times as he learned his church organist and four parishioners at Christ Church Georgetown had also contracted the novel coronavirus.

A full body CT scan identified no blood clots, no new pneumonia and no abnormalities that could explain his deteriorating condition.

The doctor at the Catholic-affiliated MedStar Georgetown University Hospital told the Episcopal priest’s wife to just wait and pray and let his body heal.

“That was the day I felt quite antsy and really quite lost,” Lorraine Cole said, recalling how she prayed while picturing herself and her husband stranded at sea, with Jesus approaching in a boat. “I thought of my faith, and this is the exact time to hold on to that.”

Cole, 59, pulled through.

The District said that as of Sunday night, 106 of the city’s 405 known patients had recovered from covid-19, the disease caused by the coronavirus. Sunday was the deadliest day of the pandemic in the Washington region, with 16 deaths. The death toll in Maryland, Virginia and the District reached 53 on Monday.

Cole’s journey was filled with ups and downs, and it came with a cruel irony: When parishioners of Christ Church Georgetown sought comfort from their faith as the pandemic forced them into self-quarantine and disrupted their lives, the leader of their flock was the first to be incapacitated.

“For all of us today, we are all in that dark narrow path as people, as a community, as a country, and we can’t see the end of it yet,” the priest told The Washington Post in a phone interview.

“However hard the cost may be, we know there will come a point where we can see the end, and we know there will come a point we will be at the end and be able to start again.”

'Hi love . . .'

The news that the global pandemic had reached her home in the District’s stately Georgetown neighborhood landed in Lorraine Cole’s phone with a dash of British humor.

“Hi love, I know you are up to your neck in contracts at the moment. Unfortunately I am presumptive positive for the coronavirus, which is a bit of a surprise,” Cole texted from his hospital room March 7.

Back then, the virus seemed like a distant tragedy, primarily afflicting China and Italy. Most known cases in the United States, including in neighboring Montgomery County, involved international travelers.

Cole, a former British army chaplain who came to the District in 2016, did not fit the bill. He fell sick after returning from an Episcopal leadership conference in Louisville that has since been linked to multiple coronavirus cases. He thought he had the flu and returned to church when he felt better.

On March 1, Cole oversaw four Sunday services. Before distributing Communion at the popular 11:15 a.m. service, he told parishioners to take the coronavirus threat seriously.

By Thursday, he was hospitalized with pneumonia. Two days later, he tested positive.

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Church leaders emailed congregants with the rector’s diagnosis and suspended the next day’s services, closing the historic church for the first time since a fire in the 1800s. Lorraine Cole rushed to her husband’s bedside, donning gloves, a mask and a protective apron. She would not be in the same room as him again for 21 days.

For two weeks, Lorraine Cole quarantined at home with son Tim, 22. An older daughter lives in London. By Monday, public health officials would urge hundreds who had set foot in the church on days Cole had been there to stay at home and monitor themselves for symptoms.

Christ Church Georgetown was the first of thousands of D.C. institutions upended by the outbreak. Soon, officials would shut down bars and restaurants, close non­essential businesses and ban gatherings of 10 or more people.

But before those orders came, the virus reached further into the congregation.

'Tom, I'm so sorry'

After the initial shock of learning his priest contracted the coronavirus passed, church organist Thomas Smith focused on his own health. He’d tested negative for flu after being bedridden with flu-like symptoms earlier that week.

Smith, 39, was quickly tested for the coronavirus. The results came back the next day: positive.

“Tom, I’m so sorry,” Smith recalled the priest telling him in their next conversation.

Four parishioners, who live in Loudoun County, Arlington, Alexandria and the District, would also test positive in the coming days.

Smith said the group stayed in touch, comparing notes on their symptoms. None were hospitalized or as ill as Cole. Instead of resenting the man who probably exposed them to the virus, Smith said, they focused on comforting their priest.

“In typical Tim fashion, every time we spoke, he was very concerned that there are things that he wanted to be doing and should be doing,” Smith recalled. “We tried to tell him over and over again that he needs to focus on his recovery and not worry about the community.”

Chad Thorley, the church’s senior warden and top lay official, said it was a loss for everyone to face the viral outbreak without Cole playing a visible, pastoral role — giving sermons, making phone calls, visiting the sick and officiating at funerals.

“The church is a refuge; it’s a safe haven,” Thorley said. “To think the head of the entire organization, the church — our church — had been afflicted with this, it almost seemed like an invasion.”

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The Rev. Crystal Hardin, a newly ordained priest who had joined the church as assistant to the rector less than a year earlier, took a more visible role and launched a blog with virtual morning prayers from clergy and reflections from parishioners.

On the days Cole could muster energy, he would draft thoughts that Thorley would polish into letters for the church’s email newsletter.

“It is easier to make time for God when you’re on your own, but being on your own also means having to face all the fears and uncertainties alone,” said one note, dated March 13.

“My prayer for all of you this Friday is this — That you find God in some of this frozen, unexpected, and chaotic time that has been thrown your way. That those of you with families might find a quiet time to come together with God. And finally, to all of you who, like me, are spending these days alone, that you take a few moments to find God in the silence and when you can, phone a fellow parishioner to see how they are.”

A zigzag journey

As the District’s first hospitalized coronavirus patient, Cole was the test case for medical professionals navigating new waters.

He had an opportunity to join a clinical trial to test the drug remdesivir — originally created as a possible treatment for Ebola. He declined because the trial meant moving to a new hospital for what could have been a placebo pill.

Every morning, Cole’s doctor suited up in protective gear and listened to the priest’s breathing. Bad days followed good ones. Cole emerged from intensive care only to deteriorate again.

The doctors tried anti-malaria medication and antibiotics before abandoning both. They managed the inflammation in his lungs, pneumonia and shortness of breath as the priest’s body fought the virus. But there was no cure for the virus itself.

Cole said that as the days passed, he came to terms with his own mortality and deferred to God: “I knew He would see me through.”

He missed the music in church, the singing and, most of all, the Eucharist, a reenactment of Jesus’s Last Supper in which the bread and wine are consecrated and consumed. Cole, whose father was an Episcopal priest as well, said he had not gone multiple weeks without Communion since his confirmation at age 12.

As it became clear that the nation’s churches would remain shuttered at least through April, the prospect of no Holy Week services especially pained him. The last disruption to services leading up to Easter that he recalled was while he served as an Army chaplain in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Cole said he thought much during his hospitalization about the soldiers he had ministered to in the Middle East.

“They would moan . . . about it for a bit, but they’d get on it with and make the best of the little piece of nastiness that they had,” he said.

Cole tried to focus on what he could control. He said daily prayers and occasionally kept up with the news. When he had the strength, he would walk around the room for exercise. At the right angle, he could spot some greenery from his hospital window.

Even after she and her son tested negative and their self-quarantine ended, Lorraine Cole and her son could not enter Cole’s room. They spoke via FaceTime. When Cole’s voice was too weak for speech, they texted.

As more stringent social distancing measures enveloped the city, Georgetown University Hospital prepared to curtail all visits to the facility. Lorraine Cole decided to come see her husband while she still could — settling into a chair in the corridor and looking into his room through a window.

The priest was sitting upright, oxygen tubes in his nose. Unable to hear each other through the glass, they spoke on the phone.

Finally home

The last round of waiting did not last long.

Cole’s fever finally broke. His oxygen levels stabilized. Two coronavirus tests came back negative. His energy returned.

Three weeks after he was first hospitalized, nurses brought Cole out of the hospital in a wheelchair. His wife and son were waiting. It was time for him to return home.

Lorraine went to embrace him, drawing a gentle admonition from a nurse. He needs to keep his distance for another two weeks, the nurse said. They settled for a pat on the back.

On the drive home, the streets of Georgetown were nearly deserted. Daffodils and cherry blossoms had bloomed.

“It’s like moving from a black-and-white movie to a full color one,” Cole said.

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Ever the Brit, the first thing Cole wanted when he reached his house, two doors down from the church on O Street NW, was a cup of tea. He sipped it alone on a two-person sofa in the lounge; his wife sat on a different sofa at the opposite end of the room.

Cole would sleep in the spare room while his recovery continued.

Parishioners were urged to give Cole space. One person tied a yellow ribbon on a tree outside the church rectory to celebrate his homecoming. The church itself is still locked, as are all Episcopal churches in Washington until mid-May.

Cole has started writing introductory remarks for a prerecorded online Easter service that will replace what’s normally the busiest celebration of the year, with packed pews and live choral performances.

He consecrated the Eucharist for himself and his family.

Like other Christ Church Georgetown parishioners with no services to attend, Cole listened this weekend to a prerecorded homily by the Rev. John McDuffie, who is serving as interim assistant to the rector at the church until Cole can return to work.

“My friends, Easter and resurrection life will come. It may be a lot slower than what we want it to be, with many trials and tribulations along the way,” McDuffie said.

“But as an old friend once said to me, that which is evil and causes suffering and death always caves in on itself in the end, sooner than later.”

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