VERO BEACH — One week after he was rushed to the hospital, longtime Vero Beach High School assistant football coach and former Gifford Middle School assistant principal Mike Livings died Saturday after battling a rare and debilitating disease for nearly a decade.
He was 57.
“He was very sick all day Saturday and became very incoherent, so we called a nurse who had been caring for him — she lives next door — and she checked his vitals,” Livings’ wife, Cindy, said Tuesday. “His blood pressure was really high and his oxygen level was really low, so we called for an ambulance and rushed him to the hospital.
“But his numbers never got better,” she added. “So it was time to make the choice.”
She paused for a moment, then said, “You prepare yourself and think you know what you’re going to do, but then, when you actually have to make the decision …”
With no realistic chance that her husband of 34 years would recover, Cindy Livings opted for hospice care. Surrounded by family members, he finally succumbed Saturday night.
“As weak as he was, we thought he might not survive the transport from the hospital, but once he got to hospice, he managed to hang on until Saturday,” Cindy Livings said. “I think he really wanted to make it to the wedding.”
The Livings’ daughter, Laurie, is getting married Saturday in Savannah, Ga., where her mother will walk her down the aisle.
The family held a private funeral service at 4 p.m. Sunday, and Cindy Livings was traveling to Georgia on Tuesday. She said she was sure “there’ll be some tears at the wedding,” but she didn’t know whether her daughter would mention her father during the ceremony.
Mike Livings is the son of legendary high school football coach Billy Livings, who led Vero Beach to its only state championship in 1981. A wonderfully gifted athlete to played football at Southern Mississippi, he coached with his father for 14 years.
“We had to do it that way,” Cindy Livings said of the hastily scheduled service for her husband. “That’s what the family needed.”
It was in February 2007 that Livings — then a fit and active 48-year-old school administrator who enjoyed running, golf and tennis — began to feel lethargic, as if the energy had been drained from his body. He went to a doctor, whose initial examination turned up nothing.
Months later, still not feeling well, Livings went to Shands hospital at the University of Florida in Gainesville, where he underwent exploratory surgery that revealed his kidneys were failing.
Livings had both kidneys removed in 2008 at the UAB Medical Center in Birmingham, where he finally was diagnosed with Erdheim-Chester Disease, an affliction so rare and so often misdiagnosed that fewer than 600 cases have been reported worldwide since it was discovered in 1930.
There is no cure, nor is there a consensus as to what causes it because it attacks different organs in different people. Currently, roughly 200 people in the U.S. have been diagnosed with EDC, which involved the excessive production of white blood cells but is not categorized as a cancer, immune disorder or infection.
It’s not believed to be contagious or hereditary.
“It was a long, hard fight, but I know Mike is at peace now,” Cindy Livings said. “There’s still a lot to process, and I’m sure it’ll all hit me in the next few weeks. Right now, the past week or so is all kind of a blur.
“But I know Saturday will be an amazing day,” she added. “That’s how Mike would’ve wanted it.”