Master Officer Jess Driggers doesn’t take much for granted these days, not since a rare respiratory illness nearly robbed him of his law enforcement career, his K-9 partner and his ability to walk more than a few steps.

“It sounded like a seal barking,” Driggers said, describing the cough he first noticed in 2018, which increased in severity and frequency over the years. “My body would start shaking. I would start drooling because I couldn’t control myself. There were several times I threw up from coughing so hard. I would get dizzy and have to drop down to a knee. A couple of times I fell backward.”

Over the next year and a half, doctors diagnosed Driggers first with bronchitis and then pneumonia three times. After seeing a lung specialist in Columbia and getting no answers, in early 2021, Driggers called and made an appointment with the Mayo Clinic in Jacksonville, Florida. During his intake, he experienced a coughing fit, and doctors and nurses quickly determined it was a tracheal cough. After a CT scan and a battery of tests, doctors diagnosed Driggers with tracheobronchomalacia, a rare respiratory disorder in which the walls of the trachea — or windpipe — become soft and floppy to the point of collapse.

Tests showed that Driggers’ windpipe was about 70 percent collapsed, while his left and right bronchial tubes were 100 percent and 90 percent collapsed, respectively.

“I was breathing through 10 percent of my airway, essentially, while still trying to work a dog,” Driggers said. “But I actually felt relieved, because now I knew what the problem was. And they were going to try to help me.”

By that point, though, Driggers was worried help had come too late. In December 2021, he experienced a coughing fit at work and was sent home. He remained home, out of work and tethered to a breathing machine for three months with his condition quickly declining.

Sadly, the hits kept coming. In January 2022, one of Driggers’ BPS colleagues came to his home to get his K-9 partner, Ally, who was sent back to the K-9 training school in Alabama to keep her in “working mode.” It was around that time Driggers also learned the agency would be posting his position as a vacancy, since he was not expected to come back.

“It wasn’t fair to Ally to just sit around with me and become lazy,” he said. “I understood why it had to be done. We had to do it in the best interests of the department and for her.”

Driggers wasn’t quite ready to accept that outcome. Instead, the series of bad news lit a fire inside of him, and he became determined to do whatever it took to return to work. To repair his collapsed airway, that meant enduring a 12-hour surgery during which doctors placed pieces of mesh around his airways to help open them up. Driggers was in the intensive care unit for a week after the surgery, which left him with a 12-inch incision across his right side.

“When I woke up in ICU, I felt so different because I did not cough. I could breathe without having to put effort into it,” he said. “It hurt so bad, I didn’t want the sheets to touch me. But it was worth it. I’d do it again if I had to.”

By the end of that week in the hospital, Driggers was able to walk the halls of the hospital without assistance from staff. Of course, there was some pain and sickness during his recovery, but nothing he would let stand in the way of him returning to work.

“I wanted to go back to what I used to do,” he said. “Even though I was in so much pain (after the surgery), the breathing — it was amazing. I knew that I had been given my second chance at life, and I wasn’t going to sit around and waste it.”

BPS Chief Matthew Calhoun said Driggers had many conversations with command staff about his diagnosis, the surgery, and different paths to recovery.

“I could hear the confidence in his voice and his desire to get back to work,” Calhoun said. “I know that it hurt him deeply when he could not give it his all.”

Several weeks after returning to South Carolina, Driggers was cleared to drive and decided to pop in at the State House. Stepping into Calhoun’s office smiling, he asked, “What do I need to do to get back to work?” The Chief greeted Driggers with a grin and “a big giant bear hug.”

“The day he came by my office was a joyous day to see him smiling,” Calhoun recalled. “I had not seen that smile in several years.”

Driggers’ doctors signed off and allowed him to return to work as a BPS officer. The best part was reuniting with Ally.

“She went nuts,” he said of their first time seeing each other in months. “She saw me and jumped out of that crate and started running all over the front yard like her tail was on fire.”

Today, Driggers and Ally are back patrolling the State House grounds together, ensuring the safety of legislators, dignitaries, tourists, demonstrators, and anyone else who visits the heart of South Carolina’s state government. He is able to walk without stopping every few steps to gasp for breath, and he wants to get back to one day running half marathons.

“When I’m out here walking around, I’ll speed-walk — a little faster than a normal walk — just to see where I am,” he said. “It’s not back to that point where I can start running again. And if I can’t, I can’t. But I can breathe, and I can do things I couldn’t do for over two years.”

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