COVID and Me – My Personal Story part 4: Aftermath

This is the transcript for my YouTube video "COVID and Me – My Personal Story part 4: Aftermath".

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 COVID 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.

When I arrived home I discovered that my ex-wife had cleaned my flat to hospital standards and, because she knew when I was due to arrive, had run a bath for me as I’d informed her that I was desperate to have a decent soak.  She couldn’t be in the flat when I arrived as I was told to self-isolate at home for 14 days.  She did, however, come to my front door to welcome me home.  I was still a bit uneasy with regards to my mental state so I can’t remember who attempted to initiate a hug but I pushed her away.  It was partly because I didn’t want to pass anything onto my ex-wife but was mainly because I was frightened that she’d pass something onto me.  I felt terrible pushing her away the way I did but my mind wasn’t in a good place at the time.

After she left, I got in the bath for a long soak.  It was heavenly.  My muscles relaxed and I could have stayed in that bath all night, however, I wanted to get to bed as soon as possible as I hadn’t had much sleep the previous night.  You would never have been able to tell that I’d had trouble walking a couple of days beforehand as I moved from room to room as if nothing was wrong.  Even my arms didn’t feel the exertion of carrying my heavy bags from the car to my flat.  I dried off and went to bed.  Ah, the feeling of clean sheets and the warmth of my duvet were sublime.

I woke the next morning struggling to catch my breath and my muscles ached like I had never previously felt before.  I was back to feeling like an old man, shuffling around my flat and needing to sit down as soon as possible.  I went to my living room window, opened the curtains and felt a wave of terror crash down on me.  The outside world was not merely a place that made me uncomfortable, it was a nightmare of disease for me now.  I closed the curtains again, needing to shut out the world.

Those 14 days of self-isolation was Hell for me.  Due to my nightmare-fuelled delusions and enforced solitude in my lonely side room I was desperate for physical human contact but I couldn’t have it.  I didn’t have a problem with being on my own before COVID but I always had the choice of going out if I felt like it.  For these 14 days I didn’t have a choice and I couldn’t let my ex-wife come in either so it was a lot harder to take.

I felt like I’d gone 20 rounds with a championship boxer so my routine for the next fortnight was get up, have my meds, watch TV, go to bed and repeat.  I read the booklet I was given about what to do after a stay in Critical Care and did what I could.  I was weak as a kitten and desperately lonely.

I didn’t want to over-burden the nursing staff on the COVID ward so I waited until a couple of days to call to see how my friend Peter was doing.  I was shocked to be informed that he’d been moved to a community ward already.  The nurse couldn’t tell me where he was moved to because I wasn’t a family member so I had to wait for Peter to contact me.  He never did so I don’t know whether he was discharged from the hospital or whether he died.  It’s only recently that I’ve even thought that I may have given him the wrong telephone number in my confusion and haste.  I have plenty of regrets in my life, losing Peter is one of the biggest.

I was on the long road to recovery but COVID casts a shadow over my life even now, four years after falling victim to it.  After my period of self-isolation was over, I was finally able to hug my ex-wife and life reached a new norm.  When I was on the COVID ward, I had told Peter that I wanted to ask my ex-wife to marry me again but, in the cold light of day, I realised that re-marrying was a bad idea for both of us.

The two months’ worth of false memories kept haunting me so I figured I was suffering with PTSD, a fact that was only confirmed last year, almost three years after leaving the COVID ward and it was only around March or April this year that I started getting any help for it.  My local mental health Trust doesn’t have any PTSD specific therapists so I have to have my sessions via video call with a therapist from another Trust.

I’ve had a couple of instances of getting the feeling that I’m not really here in this reality, that I may still be in hospital or, worse still, that I’m still a lab rat being preyed on by the unscrupulous scientists from my delusions.

Two months after my discharge, my hair began to fall out in handfuls.  That worried me because I wasn’t told that it’s a common occurrence following life-threatening illnesses.  I’d recommend that patients be told that possible side effect before they leave the hospital but no one listens to me so why bother?

I still sometimes lose myself in time due to the fact that I have two months’ worth of fake memories on top of what I remember from my time in hospital so I made a SAR request for my medical records covering that period.  I’ve discovered that I did indeed struggle with someone at the start of my hospitalisation, yanking my canular out, but that was based on the blood splatters on my trousers.  I also did tear the CPAP mask from my face.  Apparently, it happened more than once as my medical records mention a number of panic attacks whilst being treated with the CPAP machine.  I can confirm that I did fall out of bed during what I thought was my escape attempt but it was actually me trying to get away from the smell when I soiled myself during my delusions.

I lost two teeth because of COVID, not directly you understand but due to the fact that I suffered so much jaw pain post-hospitalisation that I just told the dentist to pull the bloody tooth and the second had to be removed as I assumed the pain was still COVID-related jaw pain until it was too late to save it.

I didn’t get referred to the Long COVID clinic for about a year after my hospitalisation and was given very little in the way of tests so I still don’t know what long-term damage has been done to my lungs, heart or brain.  No one seems to want to acknowledge the decline in my memory or cognitive functioning so I haven’t had any scans done, something that I think should be done to anyone who’s been hospitalised with COVID.

In 2021, following a bout of salmonella poisoning and a perianal abscess, I was diagnosed as having a urethral stricture.  That was caused by the catheterisation I underwent whilst sedated and paralysed on the ventilator.  I had been having a split urine stream for months following my time in hospital which was apparently caused by the lack of force of the urine passing the stricture.  Two weeks later, I had another perianal abscess and a third started developing soon after my operation to fix the urethral stricture.  By the middle of 2022 I had had five operations under general anaesthetic and had to postpone another operation to fix a hernia that I was diagnosed with at the same time as the urethral stricture.  The abscesses and the hernia aren’t related to COVID but my slightly lower than average oxygen saturation levels since COVID have made general anaesthetics more problematic for me.

I’ve still got a lot of the symptoms related to Long COVID but, whenever I go to the GP, whichever doctor I get doesn’t let me rattle off my various symptoms because of the ‘one problem per appointment’ rule.  A cursory internet search shows that my symptoms can be Long COVID related or caused by Post Sepsis Syndrome but, as my discharge summary doesn’t mention sepsis, my GP probably doesn’t even know I had it (or a respiratory arrest for that matter) so my GP plays whack-a-mole with individual symptoms rather than consider there may be an underlying cause.  Looking at all the symptoms to see if any are related might solve all the problems at once so I may not be being treated properly as a result.

COVID’s shadow has left me constantly fatigued, gives me periods of breathlessness and my memory and cognitive functioning have declined to the point that it’s taken months to write the scripts for and record these videos.  Four years and I’m still affected by a single illness.  No one can tell me when or if I’ll ever fully recover and it’s this uncertainty that weighs heavily on my mind.

The delusions I suffered with while I was on the ventilator still affect me now but, thanks to the EMDR therapy I’m currently receiving, I’m coping with the traumatic memories that my brain concocted out of my fears, anxieties, hopes and the limited sensory input it was receiving at the time.  However, the therapy is also uncovering deeply buried traumatic memories that were triggered by my delusions as well.  In some ways, the therapy is causing future problems that I’ll have to deal with if I can ever get the one-to-one psychotherapy that I’ve been on the waiting list for so long when the PTSD-focussed therapy is over.

Will I ever get the tests and scans I need to fully deal with my symptoms?  Who knows?  Can I ever really be able to trust my mind again? And how many other people are in the same boat?  Again, who knows?

COVID and Me – My Personal Story part 3: Back to Reality

This is the transcript of my YouTube video "COVID and Me – My Personal Story part 3: Back to Reality". 

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.

To say that I was close to giving up would be an understatement.  I had been away for weeks being experimented on and the only two people who mattered to me, my ex-wife and my mother, didn’t know where I was.  I wasn’t thinking straight and I was visibly distressed.  A voice called out across the side ward, telling me that I shouldn’t worry, that they’ll find me and we’d be reunited.  It was the voice of the man in the bed diagonally opposite mine.  He reassured me that not all was lost and told me not to give up.

The man’s name was Peter and he became my anchor to reality.  I had been in a delusional state for several days and I needed someone to act as a rock to cling to in this reality or I may have drifted back into fantasy.

It’s amazing how quickly someone can become a friend under stressful circumstances especially for someone like me who finds it hard to make friends at the best of times.  I have people in my life that have spent years on my ‘acquaintance’ list because I don’t use the word ‘friend’ easily but Peter became my best friend within days.  I don’t want to offend my other friends or acquaintances, it’s just what happens under such strange stressful situations. We bonded over our shared love of movies – golden oldies and various others – and our admiration of The Goon Show.

Over the course of the next couple of days Peter helped me back to reality.  We shared personal anecdotes from our lives and we offered each other comfort when the other started to succumb to despair.  Peter was older than me although how much older I couldn’t tell you but he spoke of how he thought that COVID was a punishment for what he did during the war.  Peter had demons that rivalled my own in intensity and number so it was very easy for me to empathise with how he felt to a certain degree.  He was seemingly nervous to tell me that he spent time in military prison when they found out he was gay and he seemed genuinely relieved that it didn’t make a difference to our friendship.  To have someone a relative stranger be so open despite his unease with the revelations he was sharing made me feel even more honoured.  It’s possible that he thought he wasn’t going to make it so chose me to be a confessor of sorts, to unburden his soul before the end.

During the time I was on the side ward with Peter, we conversed on a number of subjects including the nursing stuff as they went about their duties.  We even started making plans for when we were discharged.  We started compiling a list of movies for a movie marathon weekend at my place and I told Peter that he could have my bed while I slept on the sofa during his stay.  Such plans cheered us both up while we continued to be pumped full of medication and having swabs rammed so far up our noses that it appeared the nurses were trying to lobotomise us.

Things looked up when I got a phone call from my ex-wife and she dropped off the first of several care packages for me including stuff that I probably shouldn’t have had such as chocolate bars but the doctors and nurses didn’t seem to mind.

During one of his blue moments Peter said that he wished he could taste chocolate once more before he died so I made sure that my ex-wife included a couple of his favourite chocolate bars in the next care package.

The regular phone calls from my ex-wife, the care packages and my friendship went a long way to raise my spirits and in turn I helped Peter cope even though he had more to celebrate than I did as he was mobile enough to go to the toilet on his own and I was bedbound.  Things reached a kind of equilibrium until we got the results of our latest COVID swabs. 

I got a negative result and Peter was still showing positive for COVID.  The rules stated that as I had had my first negative test result, I had to be moved to a single side room by myself.  I didn’t want to leave my friend alone because I was worried that his mood might deteriorate without our conversations.  I tried to get the doctors to let me stay on the ward with Peter but to no avail and I was taken to the side room.

I spent the next days alone in that side room with only the occasional nurse coming in to give me meds, check my vitals, take blood and bring food and a TV that only showed BBC News on a loop with no sound and subtitles.  I was able to actually watch something with sound for four hours during the morning for free but otherwise it was pay to watch and I couldn’t get the thing to work properly.

I had only my own thoughts to keep me company and after so long desperate for human contact and having it snatched away from me when I was moved from the ward Peter was on, I became lonely although I put on a brave face for the nurses.  On top of my loneliness, I was suffering with hand/eye discoordination.  I was unable to pour water from the jug I had into the cup without spilling most of it over the table and I was even having trouble drinking without dribbling water down my front.  My eyesight was blurry and I didn’t have my glasses with me so reading wasn’t an avenue for entertainment I could take.

After one of my phone calls with my ex-wife, she arrived with a care package for me that included a portable DVD player, a number of DVDs for me to watch and my glasses.  I still didn’t get to see her but just knowing she was out there caring for me raised my spirits.  She included a couple of her Laurel and Hardy DVDs that really helped me and gave me a love of Stan and Ollie that I hadn’t previously had.

Time still didn’t seem to work right as I lay in bed unable to get up so I’m not sure how long it was before I got a visit from the physiotherapists to get me on my feet again but it was a visit that knocked my confidence.  I was made to sit on the edge of the bed and gingerly put my feet on the floor, my legs promptly crumpling beneath me as I put my weight on them.

After about half an hour I was able to shuffle around with the aid of a walking frame.  I never felt so old and frail and to think I was only 49 at the time.  I was informed that the physiotherapists were planning to transfer me to a rehab ward for seven days following my discharge from the COVID ward which only served to depress me further.

My friend Peter showed off by coming round to my room for a visit with a nurse.  He wasn’t allowed to enter the room but it was a pleasant surprise that did me the world of good.  I reminded him of our plans for the movie marathon upon our mutual discharges from the hospital and we laughed about having a race to see who’d be discharged first.  That was the last time I saw Peter.

I had no intention on staying in the hospital for any longer than I had to so I spent the weekend doing as much exercise to build up my strength as I could to the point that I could get around using just my walking stick.  I did so well that, when the physiotherapists came around on Monday, they told me that I wouldn’t need to be transferred to a rehab ward.

My ex-wife brought me another care package on the Sunday morning.  It was a generous but ultimately pointless gesture because on Monday morning, completely out of the blue, I was told that my latest COVID swab came back negative and I was going to be discharged that day.

While I was waiting for my discharge papers, a Critical Care nurse came to see me and asked if I’d like to know what had happened while I was away with the fairies.  Considering a nurse had said hello to me the day before and had to explain that she was the nurse who brought me onto the ward from A&E when I first came in because I didn’t recognise her, I jumped at the chance to fill in some blanks.

The Critical Care nurse sat with me for about half an hour going through the details, most of it news to me.  I had been wheeled round to the COVID ward from A&E where I was put on a standard oxygen mask to begin with but, as my condition deteriorated, I was moved onto a CPAP machine.  Apparently, for the three days I was on the CPAP machine, I was lucid and having conversations with the nurses although I kept on having panic attacks and tried to remove the mask several times.  I ended up having to be sedated, intubated and put on a ventilator in Critical Care because, according to my medical records, my oxygen saturation level got as low as 44% at one point.

I remember her telling me that I developed sepsis and that my heart and lungs stopped working which sent me into a confused state for a moment and I began to cry, not because I fear death but because I still imagined that I would have died with no one knowing where I was as my delusional experiences were still very much part of my reality at that point.

My medical records from that time show that I did suffer a respiratory arrest but, as that doesn’t necessarily mean that your heart stops as well and I can’t find anything in the records about my heart stopping, I can only tell you what I remember the nurse telling me.  The medical records mention “respiratory arrest” and “ongoing respiratory arrest” but that’s it, however, my ex-wife told me that during a phone call with a doctor or nurse while I was sedated, she was told that I was clinically dead for five minutes. 

The only mention I can find of the word “sepsis” is in the Critical Care nurse’s write up of what she told me but that doesn’t mention respiratory arrest or heart and lung stopping either.  A conversation with another nurse in 2021 suggests that a couple of the symptoms mentioned in the medical records indicate sepsis but I have no real proof other than inference.

The nurse told me that I was at a higher risk of getting Chronic Kidney Disease although she didn’t tell me why but my discharge summary mentions “AKI” which is acute kidney injury.  My discharge summary also doesn’t mention sepsis or respiratory arrest either.

I mentioned my memories of being experimented on but she told me that those delusions are quite common although she didn’t comment on the whole globetrotting stuff.

After the Critical Care nurse left, I spent the next few hours waiting for my ride home.  I collected together as much chocolate and biscuits as I could, put them in a bag with a note containing a farewell message and my contact number for Peter and left it with a nurse to deliver as I wasn’t allowed that far into the ward with positive cases.  I did notice that Peter had received his first negative test result and that pleased me no end.  I could imagine our movie marathon already.

When the driver arrived to take me home there was some dispute over the amount of bags I could take with me because the rules were a patient and two bags but the nurse on duty convinced the driver to accept the extra bags I had.  I managed to repack everything into three bags so it was more acceptable and I was wheeled out of the hospital, bundled into a waiting car and rushed home.

I had my first breath of fresh air in about a month and I even had the strength to carry all my heavy bags from the car to my flat however I would pay a heavy price for it the next day but that’s a story for the next video.

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.

Me and COVID – My Personal Story Part 1: How It Began

This is the transcript of my YouTube video "Me and COVID – My Personal Story Part 1: How It Began".

There are events that are so impactful that your life becomes a matter of what came before and what came after.  This isn’t just a personal thing.  It’s something that can happen to a town, a country or even the world.  The event may be something positive, like getting married, or something negative, like getting married.

2020 gave us an event that created a watershed on both the global scale and, for some of us, a personal one after which our lives would never be the same.  The event was the COVID-19 pandemic and this is my personal survivor’s story.

When the pandemic hit I joked that I’d know if I caught COVID because it would kill me.  I was wrong about knowing if I’d caught it but I was very close to being right about it killing me.

I have been a martyr to chest infections since 1998 after a bout of pneumonia contracted in Florida shortly after I got married.  After that I caught colds and ‘flu very easily and they tended to get bad very quickly and stick around for longer so I was obviously worried about COVID.  When the Johnson government finally ordered a lockdown and put all the COVID rules in place, much too late of course, I followed the guidelines on safe distancing, personal hygiene, etc to the best of my ability.

The wearing of masks proved impossible for me because, on the one occasion I did wear one, I suffered a troubling panic attack as it triggered a post traumatic stress response from an earlier incident in which a neighbour tried to choke me to death when I answered the front door one night.  Other than that, however, lockdown was a breeze for me.  I had spent so long locking myself away in my flat that it was second nature.  That said, I ended up having to go to the shops more often because people had been panic buying essential items and no one was answering the phone in any of the local shops to check whether the required items had been delivered.  The streets were fairly empty so I was able to cope with the small amount of people I was forced to meet.

My ex-wife was advised to stay at home on furlough rather go to work being as she was in the high-risk category for catching COVID.  This was a situation that continued from the start of lockdown until September when she was forced by the school she worked at to return to work or be sacked.  The government had not issued definitive advice to schools regarding people like my ex-wife and so she returned to work, not wanting to lose her job.  This was a disastrous move for both of us because, in October 2020, a member of staff went to work carrying COVID into the school.  She was on the reception desk so everyone passed her as she shed viral loads of COVID on everyone who entered the building.  She didn’t report being positive for COVID until a few days had elapsed and by then she had infected my ex-wife who, like myself was unable to wear a mask.

My ex-wife had been dealing with legal matters concerning her inheritance since 2019 and, because she doesn’t have a computer, a landline or broadband, she was making video calls to Florida using my laptop in my flat.  Not knowing she had been infected, she came to make another call to her lawyers handling the financial matters and walked the virus right into my flat.  We had both been observing all the guidelines and yet we both ended up catching COVID.

A couple of days later I started exhibiting symptoms.  A national newspaper had produced a table of the symptoms of colds, ‘flu and COVID so that people could identify what ailment they had, given it was the beginning of the regular cold and ‘flu season.  According to the table, my symptoms resembled ‘flu as I didn’t seem to have any of the common COVID symptoms so I took some cold and ‘flu remedies and thought nothing of it.

The over-the-counter medication I took had no effect so I took the unusual step of calling NHS 111 to confirm whether I should be worried or not.  Obviously, they thought that it was ‘flu as well but they decided to send a non-emergency paramedic team to perform an examination which turned out to be a life-saving decision on their part.  The team arrived and, noting my low oxygen saturation level, they decided to take me to the local hospital.  I was given some time to pack some things in case I was to be admitted and we left.

On the way to the hospital, my oxygen saturation level continued to drop and they became increasingly worried.  It was the late hours of 17^th October when we arrived at the hospital and I was left in a wheelchair in a room off the A&E Department with my possessions on my lap waiting for a nurse to formally admit me.

There's a benefit to losing one's mind

Regular readers of this blog will notice that I haven’t written anything for quite a while and the answer is that I haven’t had anything I thought was worth writing and I haven’t been very well psychologically.

I lost my second cat, Blossom, on 26^th October 2017 and it completely destroyed me.  I went into a spiral of depression and grief that damaged my resistance to a bout of influenza in mid-December that turned into pneumonia over the Christmas and New Year period that didn’t fully subside until late January/early February this year.

The result of all that has been that I have lost what little empathy I had for the human race and have isolated myself as much as possible from the outside world.  It seems that I was correct in my assertion that having a cat to look after kept me human and allowed me to retain my humanity and empathy.  I do still have the same emotional range that I had but it only manifests in relation to animals and fictional film and TV characters (so much so that any sad events portrayed in those visual amusements can reduce me to tears).

Since Blossom’s passing I have found that I can’t be bothered in writing about politics, social injustices and the cruelty of the current UK ‘government’ because I feel that people just don’t care or that they’re not listening in the first place so what’s the point in wasting my time?

There is also another development that is more worrying.  I cannot seem to concentrate for more than an hour or two at a time and I am becoming increasingly forgetful.  I forget what day it is on a more regular basis than I am comfortable admitting and my train of thought can derail in an instant so that I can forget what I am saying (or writing) in the middle of a sentence.  I have noticed that I can make a shopping list for my rare trips out of the flat and find that I have forgotten to buy something that was on the list because, for some reason, I didn’t see it on the list.

I can’t concentrate on the movies and TV shows that I try to watch so they have become more of an exercise in visual and auditory distraction from the silence than the enjoyable journey into a fictional world that they should be.

I still have days where my concentration returns and I’m not as forgetful and I can have periods of clarity on even my bad days.  I even wrote a review of a movie for my Vault From The Abyss blog but it took me four weeks to complete the review to my satisfaction and the movie is only about 64 minutes long.

I suppose it could be that I’m succumbing to ‘senior moments’ but it seems a little too early for that to be happening given that I’m only 47.  I’ve mentioned my forgetfulness to my Mum but I haven’t shared with her my concerns that this could be more than just getting older as she is going through her own age-related decline given that she’s in her early 80s.

I don’t seem to have reached the level that Mum has reached yet but I can’t help thinking that we’re in a race to see which of us is going to lose our mental faculties first.

Am I just suffering from a decline in mental health due to isolation and grief?  Am I having trouble with my memory due to the years of trying to repress all the bad memories?  Or am I just losing my mental acuity due to the onset of age-related illness?

I don’t know and perhaps I don’t want to know because, as my ‘government’ is trying to kill me and my fellow disability benefit claimants, it may be a blessing that my mind is going so that I won’t feel so betrayed as I just won’t know what’s going on.

Another Assessment Hell Begins

Here’s my latest vlog on yet another persecutory attack by the DWP which will trigger another assessment less than six months after the last one. 

 

And here’s an abusive comment from Facebook that I received mere minutes after posting the video...

Just shows you the sort of stuff the disabled have to live with these days.