Jim Froula didn’t take the coronavirus seriously at first.

He had seen news stories, of course, about the virus ravaging China, about an outbreak at a nursing home in King County, Washington. He imagined the people there, many of them already struggling with health problems, huddling together between meals to stave off the loneliness. But that was 2,500 miles away from his home in Farragut, and Tennessee hadn’t yet detected a single case of the disease known as COVID-19. So he and his partner, both in their 70s, saw no reason to cancel their bucket-list trip to South America. They left for Peru on March 1.

One month later, the Knox County Health Department counts Froula among those who have recovered from COVID-19 locally.

Froula just counts himself lucky.

Though older people are generally considered to be more at risk of dying from the respiratory illness, the avid hiker and swimmer with no pre-existing conditions is not your average 74-year-old. Even so, he said, the virus knocked him down and made him weak, causing him to lose 10 pounds in 10 days as he feverishly sweated through his pillow.

"That kind of wakes you up, and you think, 'Oh my gosh.' You've been trying to eat and this is happening," Froula said Thursday. "Your body is just devouring itself to get what it needs to fight this virus."

Froula, a 38-year subscriber of the News Sentinel, contacted the newsroom after finding much of the coverage surrounding the coronavirus has consisted mainly of facts and figures. He wanted to help put a face to the pandemic — and issue a warning.

"This is serious stuff," he said. "When you hear people say that, they're telling you the truth."

'There was nothing I could do'

The jaunt to South America was idyllic until it wasn't.

Froula and his partner, Mary Coffey, went with a couple from Lenoir City on a tour via the travel company Tauck. They saw the ruins of Macchu Picchu, hiked in the Andes Mountains of Peru and admired the lush wildlife of the Galapagos Islands.

For five days, the couples stayed with their tour group of 30 people on a boat with a crew of 30 more. They disembarked several times each day to hike, swim and snorkel in the clear waters of the archipelago off the coast of Ecuador.

Froula, a retired director of the engineering honor society Tau Beta Pi, didn't worry too much about the woman from Maryland who coughed over breakfast and started wearing a mask over her face. Their boat wasn't as spacious as some of the coronavirus-plagued cruise ships drawing news headlines, and the tour group ate from a buffet in a dining room with no more than 10 tables.

The luxurious trip came to a screeching halt March 14, when Ecuadorian officials announced they were preparing to close the country's borders due to the virus. The move kicked off a logistical and epidemiological nightmare as travelers crowded together in airports and tried to figure out how to get home.

"The company said they'd get us on a flight," Froula said. "There was nothing I could do. You don't have coverage. You can't communicate. Here's Delta saying, 'Sorry guys, flight's canceled.' So I said, well, Tauck is going to get us out, and they did."

The two couples flew from Guayaquil, Ecuador — a coastal city of 2.3 million now hit hard by the virus — to Miami and Dallas before landing back in Knoxville the afternoon of March 16. Froula knew he needed to self-quarantine, so he wiped down his car and hunkered down with Coffey at their home in Farragut's Concord Hills subdivision.

'The fever, the lethargy and the couch'

A flurry of symptoms hit the next day. Froula fell into a fog and barely left the couch.

"It all just kind of came together," he said. "I must have started coughing early. I'm sure the fever came early, and the lethargy, and the couch. The sweating. The back of your head is just soaked from the fever."

Froula almost never gets sick, he said, and maybe comes down with one cold a year. He showed off a 900-miler patch he earned for hiking every trail in the Great Smoky Mountains National Park, and he spoke about winning gold in the backstroke at the Tennessee Senior Olympics in 2016. Here was a man not used to feeling weak who suddenly found it difficult just to walk to the bathroom.

Froula didn't have much of an appetite, but he tried to eat and stay hydrated whenever he wasn't coughing uncontrollably. Breathing was hard, speaking harder. Tylenol and cough syrup couldn't keep down his fever, which climbed to 101. He would wake up in the middle of the night, a puddle of sweat pooled underneath his pillow.

Froula stood on the scale each morning and watched his weight drop a pound per day.

"One hundred and eighty-two pounds is pretty much my bottom weight," he said. "If I'm swimming a lot and doing everything, I'm there. I started going down, 181, 180, 179, 178, '77, '76, and you're looking at that, and you're looking at your legs going scrawny, and '75, 174, 173, 172 — '72, you're down 10 pounds in 10 days. You look at your face and your jaws are shrinking."

Froula regularly solicited advice from his brother, an eye doctor at the University of Tennessee Medical Center. He tried to will himself to call the hospital directly, but felt too feeble and kept pushing it back. It didn't help that Coffey, 76, wasn't feeling well, either. On March 23, after a feverish weekend, she persuaded him to call. He went that day.

"They get me in, they're so good. They've got masks, they check everything," he said. "The (nursing director) says, ''This stuff is really serious.' At that point my mind goes click. This stuff is really serious."

Froula tested negative for the flu and was told to go wait in his car for a phone call. Then he drove around to a portico, rolled down his car window and met a nice nurse who promptly jammed a swab up his nose.

She thanked him and told him he'd hear back in about a week.

Vitamin C and hydroxychloroquine

A doctor from UT called Froula five days later to confirm what he'd suspected all along.

Then came the calls from kind women working for the Knox County Health Department, who chatted with him, asked him how he was feeling and ensured he was staying isolated. They were working from home, he said, and he could sometimes hear a dog barking in the background.

By that point, Froula was on the mend. Days earlier, his brother, after consulting with a fellow doctor, had recommended he load up on Vitamin C and take hydroxychloroquine. The latter is an anti-malaria drug whose effectiveness in treating COVID-19 has been a matter of dispute since President Donald Trump publicly touted it as a potential option.

Froula said the drug, now in shortage, certainly didn't hurt his recovery. But he has no way of knowing if the illness had already run its course before he started taking the pills.

Froula said he got off quarantine Tuesday and has been deemed recovered. The term, defined by the national Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, applies to patients who are at least a week from the beginning of their symptoms and have been fever-free without medication for three days. Their other symptoms also have to be improving.

The retired engineer feels stronger each day and already has put on a few pounds. He counted among his blessings his brother, his partner, his neighbors, the medical professionals who attended to him and his near-perfect health before he got sick.

Some are not so lucky. The U.S. had detected nearly 250,000 cases of COVID-19 as of Thursday, with about 6,000 deaths and 9,000 recoveries, according to Johns Hopkins University.

Froula said the woman from Maryland who donned a face mask on their trip told him she has since tested positive for the virus. So did Froula's traveling companions, the couple from Lenoir City. They both have recovered, he said.

As for Coffey, Froula's partner, she remains quarantined at home. The couple don't think she has the virus, as she coughs only occasionally and has no other symptoms. But she hasn't been tested, and she never received a call back from her doctor.

Froula declined to administer advice himself and instead urged people to listen to the doctors and experts who have laid out social distancing best practices.

"It's real," he said. "This is serious."

Email Travis Dorman at travis.dorman@knoxnews.com and follow him on Twitter @travdorman. If you enjoy Travis' coverage, support strong local journalism by subscribing for full access to all our content on every platform.