In October 2020, I received a phone call from my mother. My dad had tested positive for Covid-19 and I knew there and then that my mother would be Covid positive too as they shared the same house. At the same time my two sisters tested positive also. They hadn’t been in contact with each other in months so they didn’t play any part in each other’s infection. One of my sisters, Claire, is a nurse and she knew even before she was tested that she was Covid positive.
I was dealing with huge pressure at work as a key worker, dealing with Covid positive customers every single day, and losing many of them to the virus. We have a wall in Home Shopping dedicated to those regular customers, some of whom we were on first name terms with, who we’ll never see again. Things seemed to be positive for the first few days after the news. I kept phoning mum, asking how they were holding up, and the answer consistently came back that they were dealing with it just fine, until one Sunday night my mum rang. I’ll never forget her words as long as I live – “We’ve phoned an ambulance for your dad. His lips are turning blue and he can’t breathe well enough to put two words together”. I just knew in my heart, that was the start of it.
While my two sisters presented relatively basic symptoms such as migraine headaches and severe fatigue, my mum and dad were affected in much more severe ways. My mum was left in her house alone for a few days while my dad was in hospital. Luckily my sister Claire didn’t have severe Covid and got permission to stay with mum. My mum, as we later found out, presented very rare symptoms of Covid, those being nothing but violent vomiting for almost a week. Eventually the doctors had to prescribe her anti-nausea medication after 3 days of vomiting. After getting over Covid and getting a Covid negative test, she told us if it hadn’t been for myself supplying her and Claire with food and “craic” she would most definitely have been “found dead in a corner of the house in a pool of her own vomit”. I fell apart at that.
Dad however, spent four months in Antrim Area Hospital Covid ward, two of those four months on a ventilator. Doctors and nurses informed us six times while he was on the ventilator that he wouldn’t survive until morning. They asked us if we wanted to sign a DNR (Do Not Resuscitate) in the event his heart stopped, which we did as we all knew he wouldn’t want to be left in a vegetative state due to lack of oxygen. That was a strange night, surreal to say the least. They had put my dad’s life in our hands in a way. Thankfully dad started to improve and respond to treatment, but after a couple of months some of the medication he was on was making him nauseous. One day after consistent improvement we received a phone call from the hospital bearing bad news. My dad had vomited and had aspirated the vomit into his lungs. After having his dependence on oxygen consistently reduced over the course of the past couple of weeks, they had to push his oxygen right up to 100% and put him into an induced coma so they could control his breathing. They didn’t hold much hope for him during that time as his lungs were already weak from Covid. He did however, fight his way out of that too. The doctors later told us they didn’t expect him to survive that episode.
One thing that isn’t regularly conversed upon is the immense stress and pressure on the families of those who have severe Covid illness. The reality sets in that nothing can be done by the family for that person with Covid. The hardest part throughout the entire episode was we couldn’t be there with dad. He had to fight Covid alone and he was scared, the doctors told us he was scared and yet we could do nothing about it. We couldn’t tell him to fight on, we couldn’t tell him it was going to be all right. We couldn’t tell him there was light at the end of the tunnel. He was all alone, fighting a virus medical professionals knew little about. The only people permitted to be near him were people dressed as if they were going into a biohazard zone and the same couple of nurses who came to know him as Derm. When doctors first told him they were going to have to ventilate him, he cried. He was scared and that broke our hearts. My mum didn’t open their Christmas presents, instead insisting she would open them when dad got out of hospital. She didn’t know whether he would survive or not, but there’s a beautiful little ‘spark’ we humans possess called ‘hope’ and it dragged our entire family and many other families facing Covid through to the light at the end of the tunnel.
My family owes a huge debt of gratitude to the doctors, nurses and consultants in Antrim Hospital. They are literally the only people who can fight alongside our loved ones when they contract this horrendous virus. So while we cannot do anything for them in their time of need, the NHS are their guardian angels. They help them fight the fight, they urge them on and fight by their side every step of the way. They pick our loved ones up when they are weak and fall to their knees but in the end, they can only do so much and the fight must be fought and won by those lying in those hospital beds with the virus.
When my dad eventually left ICU for a ‘normal’ ward, all the nurses lined up in the corridor and clapped him out of ICU in a guard of honour, many were in tears. As a key worker, I can say without a shadow of doubt, I am nothing in the face of these guardian angels. I could never do what the doctors and nurses of the NHS do. People like my sister who I am immensely proud of, and I will fight tooth and nail to support their right to fair pay for saving untold lives while some ignorant people dismiss this deadly pandemic a “hoax” and a “government conspiracy” – people who have most likely never been touched by Covid.
Save our NHS…it’s the least we can do, after what they have sacrificed for us.
Comments are closed.