An asthmatic woman is among the country’s COVID-19 survivors after a near-death experience with the deadly virus.
On Wednesday, Deputy Chief Medical Officer, Dr Karen Gordon-Boyle shared the painful experience of the patient, identified only as “Natalie,” in an attempt to show citizens the effect the virus can have on one’s body.
According to Gordon-Boyle, on a Friday Natalie went to bed feeling extremely exhausted and had a particularly tough weekend. The following Monday she began feeling excruciating pain in her legs, which she thought was a trapped nerve and she treated herself with paracetamol. The pain, doctors later told her, was as a result of the virus going to her muscles. She said the woman had a cough but it wasn’t persistent, which people think is always the sign.
Later Natalie felt extremely cold and began shivering and even with four hot water bottles and two blankets she was not able to feel warm. A fever then set in and she felt as though her body was on fire, all the while experiencing “splitting headaches” and being unable to eat as she was vomiting.
“I’m asthmatic and that really worried me, but I still thought I could ride this out at home. Within a few more days I was slipping in and out of consciousness and I have vague recollections of my 15-year-old son telling me he’d called 911 for me,” Gordon-Boyle quoted the woman as saying. She added that when EMTs arrived, they said Natalie was in a bad condition and an oxygen mask was placed on her as she was taken out to the awaiting ambulance. It was noted that one of the hardest things Natalie went through was seeing the look of helplessness on her mother’s face even as her mother was unable to come close to her due to the fact that she had a heart condition and was at high risk if she were to contract the virus.
While in the hospital Natalie noted that when an X-Ray was conducted it showed that she had pneumonia in the lungs. She was placed on oxygen 24/7 as a result. She experienced sharp pains in her chest, which she described as feeling like she was being compressed with slabs of concrete. Additionally she noted that she experienced stabbing pains in her stomach, which felt as bad as labour contractions, “I cried out ‘I can’t take this anymore! I can’t carry on!’ By the time the pains subsided, I was almost delirious,” she was further quoted as saying.
Gordon-Boyle added that Natalie didn’t remember much of the first few days and only vaguely recalled nurses walking in and out of the hospital room all day. However, she remembered that there were four beds in the hospital room and the persons who occupied those beds all had an underlying health condition. When Natalie was placed in that room, there were already two women, both of whom were diabetic. A third woman was brought to the bed opposite Natalie’s a few days after she was admitted.
Natalie stated that most of the noise came from her ringing the bell and gasping for drinks of water.
“I was so weak it’s all I could manage to say, that and ‘commode’. That was when I started hallucinating. I was getting flashbacks of conversations I’d had in my life and people I’d met. At one point I thought: ‘Am I alive or dead? Do these flashbacks mean I’m transitioning to death? Is this what people mean when they talk about your life passing before you when you die?’ And then I’m saying: ‘No, I don’t think actually I am dead, because there’s no white light and no angels and nobody calling me,” Natalie was said to have recalled saying.
In the midst of her hallucination, Natalie suddenly heard a male nurse saying, “She’s gone.” The woman who was brought into the room a few days after Natalie had died.
Natalie listened as the nurses placed the body in a body bag and then on a metal trolley. “That’s a sound you don’t forget… The day before, I’d been looking at somebody and now the bed was empty. That thought really affected me,” the woman was quoted as saying.
After that Natalie began watching the woman in the bed which was diagonal to hers. She watched as the woman slipped into a coma and saw when the woman’s daughter rushed to her and say, “Mum, it’s me! Mum, it’s me!”
Natalie said that it was a pitiful scene because the woman was already “gone.”
Following that incident Natalie fought to stay alive even though she almost gave up at the beginning but she told herself that she is only 49 and was not ready to die. She said that her sister Lorraine, and her brother, Richard, texted her constantly and that gave her the will the fight to stay alive. That very day health care workers tested Natalie’s blood oxygen saturation levels and was told that it was at a normal level. Natalie said that the doctor then told her that she made it and he was glad to discharge her.
Natalie recalled being very excited to be going home even though she would have to bed-bound for the next few week.
“The doctors said it could take three to six months to get over the pneumonia.
I touched death and I’m very lucky to be alive. What I’m now looking forward to is appreciating nature. You realise material things don’t matter… I’ve been given a second chance,” Natalie said.
According to Gordon-Boyle, the woman’s story was shared to give citizens the vivid image of the pain and horror that a COVID-19 patient can experience. “And we should note that it is not just the patient that suffers but the family members that cannot be there for them” she added, while urging Guyanese to follow the issued guidelines to protect themselves from contracting the virus.
