What It Took to Come Home: How Covid Almost Killed Me, and Survival Changed Everything

When Kenneth Teter walked into the hospital with Covid, he thought he was sick. He did not yet understand he was dying.Within days, he would pass through an overwhelmed emergency room, receive one of the last ICU beds available, say goodbye to his wife over FaceTime, and disappear into seven days on a ventilator.But waking up was not the end of the story.Survival left him weak, shaken, oxygen-dependent, and changed in ways he could not fully understand at first. Coming home meant learning that discharge was not recovery, that ordinary tasks could become mountains, and that the family waiting outside the hospital had lived their own version of the trauma.Raw, reflective, and deeply personal, What It Took to Come Home is a memoir about illness, survival, recovery, family, faith, and the brutal clarity that comes when life is reduced to one essential truth: Breath.