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Michigan native Teresa Cichewicz fondly recalls her father, Robert Anthony Michanowicz, as “the breath of fresh air that everyone liked to have around” and someone who “brought joy everywhere he went.”
In November 2021, in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic, Cichewicz was looking forward to Thanksgiving dinner with her father and her family. What she didn’t know was that it would be the last holiday she would celebrate with her father.
By Dec. 8, 2021, her father was dead — a victim of COVID-19 hospital protocols, Cichewicz said.
In an exclusive interview with The Defender, Cichewicz detailed how soon after Thanksgiving dinner in 2021, she came down with a cold that soon spread to other members of her family, including her father.
Her father developed trouble breathing and was admitted to a local hospital where three days later, on Dec. 8, he died.
Cichewicz discovered that her father had been given remdesivir and other medications without his consent, or that of her family. Today, she blames those medications for her father’s death — and has become an advocate for other families who have had similar experiences as a result of COVID-19 hospital protocols.
Cichewicz shared medical documentation with The Defender to corroborate her story.
Hospital admission ‘last time we heard from him directly in person’
In the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic and widespread vaccine mandates in 2021, Cichewicz said she and her family remained steadfastly against “forced vaccinations and against the protocols that we were observing nationwide and worldwide.”
“Understanding that COVID-19 was still out there, we still continued to live our lives the best that we could,” she said. “And so, we got together for Thanksgiving, 2021.”
Cichewicz said she was the first in her family to come down with cold symptoms soon after Thanksgiving, followed by her husband and, within a few days, her parents, who had since returned home. They all subsequently were diagnosed with COVID-19.
“We had followed the protocols that had been spelled out by America’s Frontline Doctors and some of the other groups that we were following at the time,” Cichewicz said. These protocols included high doses of vitamin C and zinc. “We were also in the process of procuring ivermectin at the time,” despite difficulties.
Cichewicz credited the protocols with helping her and her husband quickly recover. Yet, she was “really concerned” about her parents when they contracted COVID-19, as they lived in a “more remote area” with fewer available resources.
“I was really adamant to try to get ivermectin to them even though I was still trying to get it myself,” Cichewicz said. She was in the process of doing so when, on Dec. 5, 2021, her father “was really quite unwell … to the point where he couldn’t breathe, couldn’t get out of bed, he wasn’t eating, he wasn’t standing up, he wasn’t moving.”
Michanowicz was 70 years old at the time and, according to Cichewicz, while he had “some heart stents” and was taking heart medication, “he was healthy, according to his doctor, whom he visited regularly” — although his doctor refused to prescribe him ivermectin.
“He was in good shape,” Cichewicz said. A month prior, her father had performed construction work on her house. “To go from that, in my mind, the picture of him being in optimal health, to seeing him on his deathbed on Dec. 8, just a few days later, it was devastating,” she said.
With her father’s condition deteriorating, “both my dad and my mom decided, let’s go try to get potassium and oxygen at the hospital,” Cichewicz said. “All they wanted to do was just to get hydrated because he had a history of not being hydrated.” He was subsequently admitted to Charlevoix Hospital in Charlevoix, Michigan.
Cichewicz’s mother was not allowed to enter the hospital because of her positive COVID-19 diagnosis. “My father basically stepped out of the car, and he could barely walk. He was fumbling on his way to the door to check himself into the hospital because my mom was not allowed inside,” Cichewicz recalled.
“That point is the last time we really heard from him directly in person before he died,” she said.
Hospital administered morphine, remdesivir against family’s request
Trouble began immediately after Michanowicz was admitted to the hospital, Cichewicz said.
“My mom had to wait six to eight hours before getting any word about what had happened to him, what his status was,” she said. “No phone call from the hospital, nothing. She had to call several times to get through and to get his status.”
As Cichewicz later learned, “By the time we were able to actually reach someone, they had already injected my father with remdesivir.”
By that point, “He was not breathing. His mental state was really quite bad because of low oxygen. He was unwell, with a high fever,” Cichewicz said.
This occurred despite her family’s insistence, Cichewicz said, that “at every chance she had with the doctors,” her mother told them, “Do not give him remdesivir.”
According to Cichewicz, not only were these requests ignored, but doctors also refused to administer ivermectin despite the family’s requests.
“They said no, there’s no way we can give him ivermectin. We don’t even have it,” she said. Instead, they told her family, “We have to follow our protocols,” even though “they wouldn’t tell us exactly what those protocols were.”
“Keep in mind, he was healthy before he went into the hospital,” Cichewicz said. “By that point, he kept mentioning he was a very sick man. He was very unwell.”
“Almost immediately, overnight, he rapidly declined further to the point where they were telling us, ‘We had to strap him to his bed because he was trying to leave, he was trying to escape,’” Cichewicz added.
In addition to remdesivir, Cichewicz and her family learned the hospital also administered morphine to her father, “which was not authorized by us.”
“In the course of two days, he was basically a completely different person, after they had injected him with many different things that were uncalled for,” she said.
According to Cichewicz, it took some sleuthing on the part of her family to find out what was being administered to her father.
Because he was dying, an aunt who was unvaccinated was able to visit him and took note of the medications she observed Michanowicz was receiving — which, as it turned out, included remdesivir.
“That was not something that we had authorized,” Cichewicz said. “So, by that point, we realized that we had to get him out of the hospital. He was declining every night.”
Death ‘at the dictation of these evil hospital protocols’
However, on the morning of Dec. 8, Cichewicz said her mother woke her at 3:30 a.m. after receiving a call from the hospital that her father “went into some sort of a coma” and was in “an unresponsive state.”
Cichewicz set out on the three-hour drive to the hospital. “I was on my way to basically say goodbye to my dad at that point,” Cichewicz said. “Having lived COVID, my mother and myself, we understood the symptoms of dealing with it and treating it ourselves. We were dealing with it. And so, we understood what was going on.”
“The major difference between what happened to him and what happened to us was that the hospital was involved,” she said.
On the drive there, another phone call from the hospital relayed the news that her father “had woken and he was speaking.”
“That was a sign of relief,” Cichewicz said. “We didn’t know what was happening behind the curtains, if you will, but we had to get him out of there. And so, we decided that helping him be removed from the hospital via hospice would be an avenue, just to get him home.”
Yet, a half hour later, everything changed, according to Cichewicz. While still en route to the hospital, she and her mother found out that the hospital “wanted to roll him, and when they rolled him, he immediately died.”
“I don’t know if they had given him something else before then,” Cichewicz said, “But he was not able to make it out of the hospital that morning. Unfortunately, he died in the hospital.”
Cichewicz recalled the final time she saw her father.
“I arrived about 30 minutes after the fact, and so he was still in the hospital bed,” she said. “I was able to see him in his final state after he had passed. But it was at that moment that I realized what had just happened since the 5th [of December].”
In all, Michanowicz spent three-and-a-half days in the hospital, from the time of his admission to the time of his death.
“To have his life carelessly played with by overworked medical staff at the dictation of these evil hospital protocols is so devastating,” Cichewicz said. “He was someone we lost too soon.”
‘Patronizing’ treatment from doctors and hospital staff
Cichewicz said the treatment that her father and she and her family received by doctors at the hospital was “patronizing.”
“On the phone, the doctors patronized my mom, laughing at her that she was asking for ivermectin or patronizing her by making her feel like the request was very stupid,” she said. “It was very frustrating, to feel like we weren’t educated, or we didn’t have some medical degree to be able to find an alternative treatment.”
According to Cichewicz, she and her family were also stonewalled by the hospital when they requested her father’s medical records.
“It took us six months to actually get his medical records,” she said. “We really pushed, and we called many of the numbers. They didn’t call us back, never responded to our emails. They were giving us the runaround.”
“Eventually, I was able to have a lady actually send those virtually to us,” Cichewicz added. “We never did get any hard copies ever, but we did get them electronically.”
The records confirmed that her father had received unauthorized treatment.
“[I found out] that they had injected him with remdesivir and morphine against our wishes, and some other drugs which we did not authorize.”
‘Look for the people who are willing to help’
It was at this point that Cichewicz began to seek help and support from others, in an effort to get some justice for her father’s death.
“My father always told me, ‘Look for the people who are willing to help. They are your biggest asset,’” Cichewicz said. She found the FormerFedsGroup Freedom Foundation, to which she now belongs as Michigan state secretary, and “We had our story also recorded there.”
The FormerFedsGroup is a nonprofit representing victims of COVID-19 vaccine injuries and COVID-19 hospital protocols, and their families. The group is associated with the COVID-19 Humanity Betrayal Memorial Project, which has recorded and preserved online the stories of over 1,000 such victims.
The FormerFedsGroup also filed a class-action lawsuit against the makers of remdesivir and recently organized a protest outside Pfizer’s Michigan facility which Cichewicz helped lead.
“They have helped link us to many thousands of other cases with the identical situation,” Cichewicz said. “And so, it really was the FormerFeds that led me to understand the hospital protocols.”
“That’s what set us on our mission to help others, to help people find the truth, that perhaps there’s more to these hospital protocols that needs to be relayed to the general public, that needs to be stopped, that needs to be changed,” she added.
“The three things that we’re really focused on is awareness, accountability and change,” Cichewicz continued. “Before anyone can do anything further, we need to raise awareness to the general public.”
The FormerFedsGroup recently sought to raise awareness in Michigan through a billboard campaign near Grand Rapids, Cichewicz said.
“The reason why that location was important is because there’s a lot of traffic from Michiganders out to the lakeshore in the summer months,” she said. “To capture the highest number of views, we wanted to choose that target market as the first wave.”
According to Cichewicz, the billboard campaign made waves in Michigan.
“We’ve had numerous calls, half in support, some not so agreeable, but in either case, people are being made aware that there are other things to consider around these COVID-19 deaths,” she said.
The billboard campaigns led to hospital protests, which occurred just a few weeks ago at three Michigan hospitals — Trinity Health Grand Rapids, and Beaumont and Henry Ford in Detroit.
“We were standing outside on public property with some signs illustrating the fact that COVID-19 deaths were possibly related to remdesivir,” Cichewicz said. “We had a lot of people in support of that. We had nurses come out in support, saying ‘We agree with you guys.’”
Cichewicz said that through the stories FormerFedsGroup has recorded, a list of 25 commonalities was developed chronicling how unvaccinated COVID-19 patients were treated in hospitals, including isolation, lack of informed consent for treatments like remdesivir, a lack of water, and instances where patients were restrained to their beds.
Cichewicz advises those who have had similar experiences to not lose hope.
“There are a lot of other people out there who can help you,” she said. “There are avenues to keep trying and there’s a lot of work still to be done. My advice is to keep pushing.”
