Sick Boy: The Final Part

If you missed Part 4, read it here.

"Do you know who you are? Do you know what has happened to you? Do you want to live this way?" - Christina Yang (Grey's Anatomy)

My time in the private room was an emotional time for me. My body was finally steered back onto the course, so there was some extra energy to start peeking into the folder I had provisionally labelled "Do Not Open Until You Are Stronger". I remember one specific evening, after a day of recalling the events and catching up with the outside world, I became panicked. It wasn't a concern-about-the-future panic, but rather a what-the-hell-has-just-happened-to-me sort of panic. A delayed reaction, I guess. A nurse came up to me - I saw her earlier when she came on duty. We spoke about why I was in hospital and what had happened since. I felt myself crying. Sobbing rather. I couldn't stop crying. I never felt tears like I did that night before - it felt like the tears were coming from some other place, where the tear reserves were still full. The nurse, whose name I wish I remembered, looked at me, while she pulled a chair closer. She sat next to me. I half expected some "Be happy you're alive!" speech, but she read the room splendidly by saying nothing. She held my hand with one hand and stroked my hair with the other. She started softly singing a song that she said her mother sang to her when she was young. It wasn't in English or Afrikaans, so I didn't understand the words. Or, at least, my mind didn't understand them. I am certain my soul understood every single word. I drifted off to sleep as peacefully as I could remember.

The next morning, Jody said I could take a walk outside - if I felt up to it. When I finally set foot outside for the first time in a month, I heard the words "Do you know who you are? Do you know what has happened to you?" inside my head. I felt like I was violently shaken out of a nightmare - one that had only recently started to turn into a palatable show after all. Instead of feeling on top of the world (as many believed I should), I felt terrified, weak, and vulnerable. You see, being very suddenly made aware of your mortality, is no small thing. You may be reading this thinking "Of course! We could all die any moment!", but that's not the same thing. I was suddenly aware that I could die. The idea of death was no longer a far-in-the-future happening for me, it was an immediate threat. It was a threat that I had just had a showdown with a couple of weeks earlier. I won that fight. I pulled off The Great Escape! I did not want the threat of a rematch.

As I started feeling better, we could ramp up the rehabilitation. Jody promised me that I would not go home in a wheelchair. He kept his promise. His care, patience, and friendship carried me through - not only during my time in the hospital but ever since.

When I finally improved enough, I was given a release date. I was going to be allowed to go home. The thought of going home brought on mixed emotions. On the one hand, I would be with my partner and our cats, but on the other, I was scared that some new setback would hit me as soon as I left the hospital. Joy quickly triumphed over fear when I was finally back home.

The cuddles with this guy did not hurt at all!

At my six-week post-discharge doctor's visit, I was prodded and tested. Of particular concern in most post-Covid patients at that time, was the lungs - the same was true for me, and I had barely stopped coughing since I was discharged. It's now two and a half years later, and I'm still coughing. But anyway, I was shown the comparison of my chest X-rays on the morning of the relapse, and the morning of the six-week checkup. I thought it would be cool to show it here:

Before and After

When I sat opposite the doctor in his consultation room, I watched him comb through the results of the many tests they had just performed on me. I could see him comparing the results to those of when I was in the hospital. He still looked exhausted, poor man. He finally looked up at me, took his hand out of his hair, and said "I don't understand how you were that sick not long ago. These results are near perfect." I could feel the tears gather again - this was it. I was finally out of it. I survived.

In the two and a half years since, my life has been very different. I am happy to be here, of course, but no day since July of 2021 has been without pain for me. In fact, when I started writing the "Sick Boy" series, my goal was to explain what my daily life post-Covid has really been like. To explain how much Covid had really stolen from me and by some estimates, 10% of people who had it. But, as I continued writing, I started thinking about all those people who didn't end up winning their battles and would never return home. There will be future posts and a time to write about what my life looks like now, but this is not that time.

In honour of those people - and of their families, the final words in this series will not be about what Covid took from us.