FROM THE RECORD ONLINE
RYAN SENN’S COVID FIGHT
With 250,000+ living alumni and active collegiate members, extraordinary stories come from all corners of Sigma Alpha Epsilon. It would be nearly impossible to highlight them all in each issue, so the staff now shares as many as possible on The Record Online. You don’t need to wait for the magazine to arrive in the mailbox to keep up with the latest news from the Realm. Visit therecordonline.net/subscribe to sign up for notifications each time a story is posted or for a weekly email digest. I got the news on November 11. The text followed shortly after. My husband’s fraternity brother, Ryan Senn (Louisiana Tech ’04) was hospitalized with COVID. He was sick. Really sick.
When it’s filled with love and kindness instead of hatred and divisiveness, it can literally move machines across the world. This is a story about recovery and resurrection. Resolve and fortitude. And good old-fashioned grit.
As I’m writing this, there are nearly 24 million confirmed COVID cases in the United States and nearly 400,000 people who have died from COVID. And that’s only in our country. The pandemic has impacted the entire world. But the horror of COVID doesn’t affect you until it does. I didn’t know anyone who had been hospitalized for COVID, and certainly not someone as young and purposeful as Ryan. He and his family traveled to Zambia in 2016 and 2019 to help orphaned children. He promised them he would be back to see them graduate from high school. This didn’t feel real.
This is Ryan’s story, told by him and all of his heroes, who never gave up on their Superman.
Oh my gosh. Are you OK? I texted Ryan.
“This was really early on,” said Brad Bourgeois, “And I was like, ‘Are you serious?’ I mean no one was wearing all of that to the grocery store, and he said, ‘Yes I am. I don’t want to see you one day through a glass window on a ventilator.’”
Three dots. And then the four words that became my mantra over the next five weeks.
...COVID CAN’T KILL SUPERMAN. Like the mystical Phoenix rising out of the ashes, this is the story about resurgence and life. This story begins and ends with Superman fighting a battle he can only win with support from a world full of superheroes. This is a story about human beings having faith and persistence – about the power of social media. 16
On Halloween 2020, Ryan, 40, started feeling sick. He is an assistant supervisor at Louisiana United Methodist Children’s Home and Family Service in Ruston who was taking COVID precautions before it was mandated. In March 2020, right after the quarantine, he sent his friend a picture of himself, masked up, complete with PPE, on his way to the grocery store.
But on Halloween, after an outbreak at the children’s home where eight children had tested positive for the virus, Ryan was afraid he also had it. He told his wife, Sharon, that his body hurt and she laughed it off. Sharon is an emergency room nurse at Northern Louisiana Medical Center in Ruston, a seasoned health care professional, who for the past 10 months has worked with sick COVID patients, and her husband had never even had the stomach flu, much less the real flu. So, the thought of COVID never even crossed her mind.
