A nurse who supports vulnerable children has made an incredible return to work after spending six weeks in a coma. Rod Morris, 72, has 56 years' experience of supporting vulnerable children and young people with mental illnesses.
But Rod has faced his own personal health battle, as reported in The Mirror. He collapsed one day in May 2020 and was diagnosed with sepsis and pneumonia.
Doctors identified a nodule on his lung as cancerous and his leg muscles wasted away after spending months in a hospital bed. As Covid peaked, Rod was put into a coma at Middlesbrough James Cook Hospital.
It took Rod, a dad of seven children and grandad of 11, over a year to recover. But the divorcee, from of Redcar, North Yorkshire, is now fit enough to go back to his caring role.
Now back working for the Tees, Esk and Wear Valleys NHS Foundation Trust, and based in Middlesbrough, he said: “I am a warrior, a fighter. I am going to carry on – no surrender.”
Rod’s ambition is to chalk up 60 years with the NHS – retiring at 76. His daughter Joanna Morris, 42, of Stockton, Co Durham, said: “The fact he’s recovered as well as he has from such grave illness is incredible but that’s just the kind of fighter he is.”
