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Covid and me: 10 days on life support | Free to read
After a month in hospital, FT critic Tim Hayward reflects on his battle with coronavirus
www.ft.com
By the Financial Times critic Tim Hayward
I am wheeled into a side room with four medics. One introduces himself as an anaesthetist; another, directly and with no hedging, tells me they’re “worried I’ll pull out the tubes” — they need to put me to sleep. There’s no debate . . . I guess that’s the point. But, like every other news junkie and doom scroller in the country, I know what this means. People who go into intensive care, who get anaesthetised and held on life support, don’t tend to have what the news euphemises as “good outcomes”. I’m hit with awful clarity that this is probably the most significant moment in my whole life. “It will just feel like going to sleep,” says the medic. True . . . but I have no idea whether I’ll wake up.
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On December 15, I’m discharged with a big bag of p ills and an assurance that community teams will be in touch to support my recovery. I was in Addenbrooke’s for 30 days. For about half that time, I was on oxygen; for 10 days, I was fully unconscious and on life support. For 30 days, I didn’t use most of my muscles and spent only minutes out of bed. I lost just over 14kg in weight, around two stone. I’d like to say it was all fat but, sadly, a lot of it is muscle. My legs look like two bits of grey wool, my stomach is pleasingly flat, but so is my chest. I get exhausted after about 10 minutes of anything. My voice has lost its resonance and I’m cold all the time — no muscles working to generate heat, no fat to insulate. All of this, they tell me, is likely to come back with the physiotherapy. The “clot-busters” should get rid of my embolism, though I’ll have to take drugs for it daily, and take precautions to avoid any bleeding. If I nick myself with a kitchen knife, it may well need a tourniquet not a blue plaster.