COVID and Me – My Personal Story part 2: The Nightmare

This is the transcript for my YouTube video "COVID and Me – My Personal Story part 2: The Nightmare".

Before I pick up the story from where I left it, I’d like to say that I’d be genuinely interested in hearing from anyone who spent time hospitalised with COVID especially anyone who was put on a ventilator to find out if there are any similarities to my experience.  I also wish to warn viewers that discussion of life on a COVID ward can be triggering; I know this from personal experience because just having to remember what happened to me has triggered me and I’m not covering the experience in great detail.  Finally, you will get the most of this account if you watch the entire video.

I don’t know how long I was waiting to be formally admitted to A&E as time bent and stretched out of shape as it tends to do when you have nothing to think about except your breathing (or, in my case, wheezing).  However, I remember a nurse coming to record my vital signs before starting to wheel me into the busy A&E Department.  We had barely moved a couple of feet before my memory starts to blur.

There’s a glitch in my recollection that ends with the memory of a struggle in which the canula in my right arm was yanked out, spraying the area with blood or that’s how it seemed.  I tried to get away from the people I was struggling with and then everything went black.  How long I was unconscious for is one of life’s unknowns but, when I regained consciousness, I was no longer on a standard hospital ward.

As I lay unmoving on my bed I could see two patients in beds opposite me, both were Afro-Caribbean in varying degrees of distressed breathing.  The man on my left of my field of vision seemed to be holding his own with a simple oxygen mask over his nose and mouth.  He was hooked up to monitors and was uncommunicative but otherwise as fine as a hospitalised COVID patient could be.  The man on my right, however, was not in a good way.  It seemed as though the angel of death was just waiting to take him as he was struggling to breathe on his own.  There were machines beeping all around him, tubes stuck in both arms and he either had a CPAP oxygen mask or was already intubated.  Doctors and nurses were hurrying around, whispering conspiratorially so that I couldn’t really hear what was being said.  As for myself, I had a drip in one of my arms and had regular blood pressure checks so it seemed like a normal hospital experience until I looked out the window to my left – I didn’t recognise the landscape outside.  I got the feeling of being in a building taller than any of the hospital buildings and there was a cityscape in the distance which was totally at odds with the area surrounding the hospital where I was taken.  I thought I recognised the cityscape from photos I’d seen but that was ridiculous.  Could I really be seeing Hong Kong out of the window?

I spent the next couple of days or so slipping in and out of consciousness only to be woken at regular intervals to have my vitals checked by nurses who were eerily silent.  I was given injections, hooked up to drips and, when my breathing became laboured, an oxygen mask.  I was given sips of water throughout my conscious hours but no food.  The view from the window hadn’t changed so I began to familiarise myself with my surroundings as there was little else to do.  Between the two patients I saw opposite me there was a sign that had a word and a number printed on it.  I can’t remember the details of what was on the sign but it would have significance later so it’s best to make note of it now.

It seemed as though my bed was in the middle of the room because there were medical stations to my right and a wide space to my left.  I could move my head and arms but I was otherwise immobile.  The staff had a range of ethnicities but was made up of a majority of Asians.  There was a radio playing but I couldn’t hear what it was playing and it seemed as though it was merely playing to cover the whispered conversations between the medical staff.  There was a set of double doors to my right with the medical station just to the right of the doors which seemed to be the main entrance and exit to the ward I was on.  I spent a few days just watching people mill around, going in and out of the doors and doing their duties but not much else changed.  I heard some strange conversations about special diets being used as potential curative measures to some of the other patients on the ward, who I assumed must be behind my bed.  At one point I heard a doctor angrily exclaim that “the fish had been wrongly prepared” and that the whole lot had to be disposed of.  This period of my hospitalisation ended when two nurses forced a CPAP mask over my face and I struggled to take it off.  I lost consciousness.

When I came round, I wasn’t where I had been.  There was no window to my left and I seemed to be alone in what seemed to be a makeshift ward.  I was still unable to move more than my head and arms so I looked around to get some idea of where I was now.  It seemed to be a rectangular room, quite narrow in width and the lighting was not the bright lighting of the previous location.  This room was dimly lit with an orangey light.  There were areas of deep shadow to either side of the far wall where there was a long worksurface with microscopes and other medical paraphernalia.  Directly to my right there was what I assumed to be another bed as there was a partition between myself and whatever lay beside me.

There were very few members of staff on duty for the whole of my stay in this room.  Occasionally I’d see two people go behind the partition and start whispering but I had little to no interaction between myself and the staff.  I would be poked and prodded, either being injected with something or having bloods taken but there was no talking.  Indeed, it seemed as though I was consciously being ignored even when I asked for some water as I was unable to reach the jug.  I felt as though I was being experimented on, only there to provide a guinea pig for whatever medication they thought might combat COVID or as a source of antibodies as I seemed to be holding COVID at bay.  With no natural light it was difficult to tell where I was or how long I’d been there but I heard American voices and there was mention of telephone numbers that could only have been US numbers (my ex-wife’s an American so I knew a lot of US area codes).

There wasn’t much in the way of stimulus so my mind wandered.  I don’t know whether they were daydreams, ordinary dreams or delusions but, whatever they were, they provided an escape from my forced imprisonment.  The exact details of these wanderings of my mind are very hazy but there is one specific thing I do remember – at one point my vision was entirely taken up by what I can only describe as a red mass of crystal.  It was as if the entire world crystalised in ruby.

I don’t know how long I was in this second location but it seemed like weeks, drifting in and out of consciousness and losing hope that I would ever see my ex-wife again, a feeling made worse by the fact that she had no knowledge of where I was.  Eventually I blacked out only to find myself in yet another location.

I awoke on a similar ward to the first location.  The two Afro-Caribbean patients were in their beds opposite me but the view from the window wasn’t what I saw the last time.  It looked as though there was an industrial estate nearby and the ward we were in was closer to the ground as I could see streetlights outside the window.  The man to my left seemed to have improved slightly but the man to my right was under medical watch every minute of the day and night.  At one point, the nurse watching over him thought that he was improving but it was a mistake.  Was it inexperience or fatigue?  Who knows?

The sign on the wall I mentioned earlier was there between the two beds, moved slightly in position but it was definitely the same sign.  The ward had differences to the original one as well – different placement of medical stations, different lighting and different staff with a different ethnic mix.

I had been away for weeks by this point with no end in sight for my ordeal so I hatched a plan to escape.  I’d wait for the minimum of staff to be between myself and the double doors to freedom.  I decided to use the bed I was on as a battering ram to hit the doors and anyone who got in my way.  I had observed that staff leaving the ward would turn left out of the door so I assumed that would be the way out.  The ward was at least one floor above the ground so I planned to find the stairwell, get down the stairs as fast as I could and find a way out of the building.  I intended to find a phone so I could contact the police and finally be free of the experimentation and be reunited with my ex-wife.  It wasn’t much of a plan but I was getting desperate, however, I wasn’t able to put it into action because the ward was hurriedly closed down.

I begged for them to take me to the hospital I was originally snatched from but they ignored me.  I regained consciousness in a proper hospital, just not the one I hoped it would be.  I was on a side ward with four beds in it.  I was next to the window and could see a building across the courtyard although I couldn’t get a sense of where this hospital was.  There was a man in the bed to my left who seemed to be holding on quite well whilst the man opposite him was struggling and calling out that he felt he was being punished.  The man in the bed opposite me was in a bad way.

I tried an escape from this ward although I had little to no information of the layout and it would be harder to find my way to the exit.  I managed to get out of the bed but fell flat on my face as my strength left me.  This failure demoralised me further.  I resigned myself to never seeing my ex-wife again and fell into a deep depression.  Neither my ex-wife nor my mother would know where I had gone and I would be a lab rat for the rest of my life.

Of course, none of this actually happened but the memories are as vivid and real as any memories I’ve got. The truth is much less exciting but I didn’t find the truth until the day of my discharge from the hospital so you’ll have to wait until the next video to hear what really happened together with my crawl back to reality thanks to my best friend on the COVID ward.