“At the beginning of this week, we were going on the up and up, we were so excited, seeing so much progress and then yesterday we had a pretty scary setback. She is still in ICU and we’re just working through some things as far as her setback goes.”
Schrepfer added that Retton had “a better day today, which is great” but her mom is “just really, really exhausted.”
“So I just wanted to give an update and thank you guys again for just the support,” She continued. “I’m getting so many messages and emails and… it’s so great to see people love on her.”
It was told to the public on Oct 10 that Retton was diagnosed with a rare form of pneumonia and at one point was unable to breathe on her own.
A fund was set up for Mary Lou which raised over $200K in one day after it was announced that didn’t have medical insurance.
Retton was 16 when she became an icon of the U.S. Olympic movement during her gold medal-winning performance at the 1984 Summer Games. The native of Fairmont, West Virginia, also won two silver and two bronze medals at those Olympics to help bring gymnastics — a sport long dominated by Eastern European powers like Romania and the Soviet Union — into the mainstream in the U.S.
