After he nearly died from the coronavirus, Tony Luke’s son wants to spread a message of hope

It was just a bad flu, Michael Lucidonio told himself.

On March 20, the son of South Philly cheesesteak mogul Tony Luke Jr. had a fever and some nausea — not at the time widely recognized as a symptom of COVID-19. Over the next week, on his doctor’s advice, he stayed home in South Jersey with his wife and daughter, rested, tried to recover. The first lock-down measures had just taken effect. Lucidonio didn’t know if he had been exposed to the virus, and didn’t think he was exhibiting COVID-19 symptoms as it was.

But within 10 days, Lucidonio, 35, was in the intensive care unit at Jefferson Washington Township Hospital, his lungs ravaged by the coronavirus. His best shot at survival, doctors decided, was a ventilator.

Before he went under, he begged his pulmonologist: “Please don’t let me die."

“And he looks at me and goes, ‘Don’t worry, buddy. I got you,'" Lucidonio said Tuesday. “And then I woke up, 2½ days later.”

The doctor had kept his promise. Lucidonio was on the mend.

A month after his brush with death, Lucidonio and his father are speaking out about their experience with COVID-19 to get the doubters to take the virus seriously. “People have to really understand that even if they believe it doesn’t affect them, there are people who will die from their carelessness,” Tony Luke said.

» READ MORE: Still think coronavirus is just like the flu? Here’s why COVID-19 is more dangerous.

With Lucidonio out of the hospital and improving steadily for nearly a month, they also want to provide hope for others going through the same terrifying ordeal. They want to remind other families, worried about sick loved ones, that recovery from the virus is possible even after being on a ventilator.

The family’s history made Lucidonio’s illness especially hard. His older brother, Tony III, died of an overdose in 2017. In the years since, Tony Luke has become an outspoken advocate against the stigma surrounding addiction. But when Michael grew ill, the prospect of losing another child was almost too much to bear, he said.

Michael thought a lot about his brother, too. After days of increasingly worsening symptoms, including a cough, he got permission from a doctor to get a COVID-19 test. He was still waiting on results when his breathing grew more labored. His doctor told him to get to the hospital.

Though he nearly collapsed on the way in, he waved away his wife, Michelle, as she tried to support him to the door. He didn’t want her going inside.

Admitted to the hospital almost immediately, waiting on the results of a chest X-ray, Lucidonio’s thoughts spiraled. “I’m soaking it all in — how did I get here? I was fine two days ago,” he said. “And then I realized it was March 31, three years and four days after my brother had passed away, and I realize I’m the exact age to the day my brother was when he passed.”

Is this just the expiration date that we have? he thought.

And then a nurse entered, and told him the doctors’ recommendation: intubation, and a ventilator.

» READ MORE: If you need a ventilator for COVID-19, odds are 50-50 you’ll survive. But doctors are learning more every day.

He made a last, frantic phone call to Michelle, who tried to calm him on the phone. Then she hung up and collapsed on the dining room floor in shock.

His dad reacted similarly.

“When they called and said they were putting him on a ventilator, I remember just falling to the ground, crying, begging God, please, please don’t let this happen to me again,” Tony Luke said.

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Lucidonio doesn’t remember any of the next two days.

“For the worst of this, I slept through it, as ridiculous as it sounds,” he said. “But this was so brutal on my parents and my wife. What she went through, it was so much worse than what I went through.”

Though he was alone in the hospital, nurses and physicians kept in touch with the family, even texting Michelle on his behalf from his phone when he briefly woke up, still on the ventilator, and tried to text her. After he was taken off the ventilator, he said, hospital staffers kept his spirits up. He was the first COVID-19 patient at Jefferson Washington Township to be taken off a ventilator, he said, and after he woke up, staff would come by his isolation unit and tap on the window, flashing him a thumbs-up.

“Part of why I’m speaking out is to let people know how appreciative and grateful I am," he said. “They’re the reason I got to come home to my wife and daughter.”

Nearly a month after his hospitalization, Lucidonio is mostly symptom-free, though he still feels weak sometimes — “like a broken cell phone that can’t keep a charge," he said. He and his parents talk on the phone every day.

“For me, until he’s 100%, there’s still a small part of me that’s going to worry,” Tony Luke said. “I’m elated, and grateful, and I continue to say my rosaries every single day. I can’t wait to hear him say, ‘I feel great today.’ And I can’t wait to hear, ‘There’s a vaccine.’"