Jon Gosselin had a very scary experience with COVID-19. He was hospitalized with a dangerously high fever and still has residual coughing after battling the coronavirus. The father of eight opens up about his experience on the Jan. 14 episode of The Dr. Oz Show. His girlfriend’s daughter rushed him to the emergency room after he came down with a nearly 105 fever, which Dr. Mehmet Oz observed is a temperature at one’s body can begin going into seizures.
“My stepdaughter, Jordan, [girlfriend] Colleen [Conrad]‘s daughter, took me to the hospital and I had a 104.8 [degree fever],” Jon calmly explained in a preview clip from the show. “I was in a wheelchair. I had to wait in the ER. It was packed, like, the hospital was full and then they put me on a gurney and put me in the hallway in the waiting room, so I could get a temporary room.”
“Once they evaluated me and did all of my blood work, all of a sudden, I’m getting antibiotics, steroids and a plasma antibody transfusion for COVID. It happened really fast,” the 43-year-old continued. “Then they moved me…up to another room, a more permanent room. Then I just remember sleeping and it was just surreal. Like, ‘What?’ I didn’t even realize why I was there until, like, three days later,” that’s how out of it Jon was with COVID-19.
While he is fortunately on the mend and recovering, Jon feels that he got a “second chance” by being able to beat the coronavirus, which has killed 381,000 Americans as of Jan. 13. Jon has custody of two of his 16-year-old sextuplets by ex-wife Kate Gosselin — Collin and Hannah. But he wants their siblings who live with Kate: Aaden, Alexis, Leah and Joel, to know he’s thinking “of [the] future more,” despite their current estrangement.
“I hope that one day I can be part of your life,” he says to the teens on Thursdays’s episode. “I’m glad that I got a second chance. I was more concerned about myself in the hospital and getting better and getting back to my family. I miss them. That’s another surreal part of my life that I have developed a thick skin around to move forward, to just help Hannah and Collin right now, since they live with me. Those are things that I want to build towards.”
