Covid : Putting a human face on the tragedy

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https://www.yahoo.com/gma/daughter-chronicles-dads-death-covid-19-cannot-believe-163449036--abc-news-parenting.html

Good Morning America April 15, 2020

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She wrote about the experience as it unfolded so she would have a memory of her dad's last hours on Earth. Reinhard later shared her thoughts in a moving Facebook post that gives a glimpse into what it is like for the thousands of families separated from their loved ones in critical condition due to COVID-19.

May we feel a kindred spirit with those who lost their loved ones in this tragic and ongoing calamity befalling many around the world.

Prayers and sharing a hope with all these disconsolate ones who are suffering from the sudden loss of their deeply cherished loved ones.

 

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Mom sick for 2 weeks with no end in sight 

http://digitaledition.chicagotribune.com/infinity/article_share.aspx?guid=9b197ef2-4b67-4ec6-9d9d-48bdd70dc239&fbclid=IwAR1rxyZnCYcCIAXkE6FSHJte5oAt2qfn-gAr62PdlcL8TjxcE85Z6HGBvsY

 

Chaseley, a mother of three, was told to come out of isolation seven days after she stops showing any symptoms. By Wednesday afternoon, Chaseley was feeling better and hopeful she wouldn’t come down with a fever again. Still, it feels like she won’t be able to come out of isolation until Labor Day.

“It’s a total roller coaster,” Chaseley said by phone. “It’s like the Terminator, you think you’ve beat it out of your system and then a new symptom pops up. I’m still getting fevers every night and I’m definitely more nauseous at night. There’s a sensation with my skin, that it just feels like my skin is covered in icy hot.”

She isn’t sure where or when she caught the virus. She had not gone overseas, though she did travel to Florida in late February. Chaseley also regularly goes to the gym. State health officials later told her she likely contracted COVID-19 at a fundraiser she attended March 7, because others who were at the same event later tested positive.

Chaseley remembers she tried avoiding shaking people’s hands because she considers herself a “germophobe.” Still, some people were adamant on handshaking, she said.

“I was spraying hand sanitizer all night long, which obviously didn’t help me,” she said.

The symptoms Chaseley came down with mirrored many of the warning signs people are being told to watch for if they suspect they have the new coronavirus. Within three days, on March 10, she started to feel the burning in her lungs. Then she started to feel fatigue and nausea. She went to a local urgent care where they thought she had the flu. An X-ray was taken of her chest but doctors still didn’t detect she had the coronavirus.

In those early days, she also started to notice she had lost her sense of taste and smell. Her husband made her a frozen pizza, but she couldn’t really taste it. One of her children baked cookies, but she couldn’t smell anything.

She was scared to leave the hospital, but she was told her bed was needed for another patient. The hospital suited her husband with a mask and gloves to pick her up and drive her home.

Since then, she hasn’t left her bedroom. Her husband leaves her meals outside the door and replenishes water for her, and she has her own washroom. Her three children and husband are still living in the same home. Her husband takes his and their children’s temperatures daily and sends the readings to health officials.

“I can’t wait to be able to hug them again,” she said about her family. “I can hear them downstairs and it’s just really hard to not be able to interact with them.”

Although they are in the same house, she video chats with her family. One of her daughters left her handmade crochet slippers. Her son wrote out a touching note.

“You mean so much to me and I know that I will miss you more than you could imagine,” the boy wrote. “I promise that I will never stop thinking about you for the next two weeks.”

Both of her daughters have shown some symptoms, but soon felt better. The family’s nanny is quarantined in the home’s furnished basement, where she has her own bathroom. The nanny has not been tested for coronavirus, in part because they were told by state health officials to assume it was the coronavirus if someone in the household came down with similar symptoms.

Chaseley hasn’t hidden her diagnosis. She’s heard from friends who are struggling with their children over social distancing. And those quandaries prompted her to write a detailed day-by-day public Facebook post, hoping her story would help others start to take COVID-19 seriously. By Thursday, the post had been shared by more than 11,000 users.

 

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Photographing poverty's pandemic: 'Afghans have learned to live with fear' (The Guardian)

“Decades of war haven’t destroyed their kind-hearted spirit; neither will the pandemic.”

https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2020/apr/18/photographing-povertys-pandemic-afghans-have-learned-to-live-with-fear

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https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-52353275

A coronavirus survivor's story: 'I touched death'

Elizabeth faces a recovery period of up to six months - but feels she has been given a second chance

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On the Monday, I started getting pains in my legs, which became excruciating. I thought it was a trapped nerve and took some paracetamol but the doctors later told me the virus had gone directly into my muscles. I had a cough but it wasn't persistent, which people think is always the sign. I was bed-bound for over a week but then once I did get out - to the local petrol station to get some provisions - that was when it hit me.

I got back home feeling freezing cold and shivering. At one point I had four hot water bottles on the sofa and two blankets and I just could not get warm.

Then the fever set in.

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 111 [the NHS non-emergency helpline] for me

When we arrived at hospital, we were in a queue of ambulances just waiting to off-load patients at A&E. I was lying there for about three hours until it was our turn. They put me in a wheelchair and I remember them saying they had no cubicles, they were full to capacity.

The nurse said: "I have to swab you for Covid-19." He stuck the swab stick so far down the back of my throat that I was retching, and then just as I was recovering, he said: "Now I have to do it up your nostrils." 

 

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A harrowing account about an epic battle against the coronavirus in the early days of the pandemic. Reads like a surreal thriller.

https://www.vanityfair.com/style/2020/04/how-donald-trump-almost-killed-my-husband

One of them came into the house and helped my husband down the stairs, shouting down to another EMT that he didn’t think they’d need a BiPAP. I made a mental note to ask my doctor-cousin what a BiPAP was and whether it was good or bad that Josh didn’t need one.

“I love you,” I yelled through the screen door as they wheeled Josh on a stretcher toward the ambulance. Our six-year-old son, AJ, stood in the foyer, watching the whole scene unfold with wide-eyed wonder: Who were these guys? And why were they wearing space suits? A scary thought crept into my mind, but I quickly told my brain to shut up. We’re not going there. Of course he’ll survive this.

 

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Sandy Brown lost both her son and her husband to the virus in Flint, Mich. The state has the highest death rate in the country, at 6 percent

 

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/coronavirus-news

Brown of Grand Blanc lost her 59-year-old husband, Freddie Lee Brown Jr., and her 20-year-old son, Freddie Lee Brown III, within days of each other in late March, CBS affiliate WWMT-TV reported.

"My two men are gone.

The younger Freddie, who was a student at Mott Community College and Brown's only child, died March 29 - three days after his father

"There's not even a word created to describe my pain. It's unimaginable," said Brown, whose son and husband were laid to rest Friday. "In three days, I lost my husband and son to an ugly plague. I watched my son go from completely well and whole and happy to being gone in three days."

Brown put a Michigan State jersey on the casket of her son, who was set to attend the university in the fall

Edited May 23, 2020 by M'Awan

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https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2020/12/how-iowa-mishandled-coronavirus-pandemic/617252/

 

Updated on December 7

 

IOWA CITY, IOWA—Nick Klein knew the man wasn’t going to make it through the night. So the 31-year-old nurse at the University of Iowa ICU put on his gown, his gloves, his mask, and his face shield. He went into the patient’s room, held a phone to his ear, and tried hard not to cry while he listened to the man’s loved ones take turns saying goodbye. When they were finished, Klein put on some music, a muted melody like you might hear in an elevator. He pulled up a chair and took the man’s hand. For two hours that summer night, there were no sounds but soft piano and the gentle beep beep beep of the monitors. Klein thought about how he would feel if the person in the bed were his own father, and he squeezed his hand tighter. Around midnight, Klein watched as the man took one last, ragged breath and died.

 

Just a few weeks ago, a man in his 30s with no medical problems arrived in Kevin Doerschug's (director of the hospital’s medical ICU) unit with a severe case of COVID-19. After a week on a ventilator, the man’s health had greatly improved. Nurses removed his breathing tube, and his vitals were stable. But just a few hours later, the man was dead. “Our whole team just sat down on the ground and cried,” Doerschug told me outside the hospital, his voice muffled by his mask and the sound of the heating vent. Trauma like that compounds when a hospital fills up with critically ill patients. “The sheer enormity of it—it’s just endless,” Doerschug said.

Edited December 9, 2020 by Mclove