Until It Happens To You
Our journey to hell & back with COVID-19
COVID-19 showed up at our door in the twilight days of August and shook our lives unlike anything I’ve experienced in my 4 & ½ decades. 4 & ½ months on, it still has me locked up and locked in and with good reason. Mom [77], my help and I got hit at almost the same time, with mild symptoms: a low-grade fever, some coughing and soreness of the throat. After a couple of days of self-treating at home, things got out of hand fairly quickly as mom’s oxygen levels started dipping dramatically from 98 to 94 and then overnight to 88 as my own sense of smell disappeared.
What started out as the promise of a great year, especially after the shitty curveball 2019 was, soon turned into a gargantuan nightmare, acutely underlining how we were like flotsam in the hands of mother nature and her army of invisible forces awakened in the Eastern hemisphere. Margaret Mitchell aptly said, “Life is under no obligation to give us what we expect”.
Nothing prepares you for COVID-19 and while there are common experiential threads, some very tragic and some very inspiring, each experience is unique. On the one hand our help was totally asymptomatic but mom was so badly hit in her lungs, she needed ICU hospitalisation.
As any loving and responsible child would, there’s no describing the deep trauma and sense of fear one feels as your mother leaves for the hospital with your brother, gasping with saturation levels so low, she struggled to wear her own clothes that morning, while you remain quarantined at home.
As mom fought the battle of her life, the loneliness of COVID-19 was all too real, putting in question the very value system we are brought up with to be children who look after their parents in such moments. As my help and I remained under quarantine, my experiences over those next few weeks and months made me realise how little was spoken about the emotional cost of COVID-19. This experience was unlike other illnesses where families, neighbours and friends rally to help
While we were blessed with silver linings, key among them being the unflinching support of a doctor-cousin and a team of committed specialists at Bhatia hospital, the three weeks mom was in the hospital was akin to a thriller being played out on the canvas of our lives. Since COVID-19 patients are in mandatory isolation, my days revolved around update calls from the hospital, thrice a day. Nothing though matched the joy of speaking to mom, but she was irregular with her phone and I wondered why. I inquired about this on her return and she shared there were people dying in the ICU every single day hence on some days, she just didn’t feel like talking. We never discussed her non-responsiveness after that. Throughout 2020 I learned of friends and relatives losing loved ones, some not even to COVID-19, but all the same reminding us what 2020 was all about, someone else’s grief of unthinkable magnitude becoming a lifelong lesson in gratitude.
The first ten days of mom’s battle with COVID-19 were particularly brutal as her infected lungs were pumped with oxygen @12–15 lt./min. She developed pneumonia, had an episode in her heart, recorded CRP and D-Dimer readings that were drastically off-charts and underwent innumerable yet critical investigative tests including X-Ray, ECG, Blood tests, CT Scan, Doppler, 2D Echo leaving her punctured veins blue. Her medication was a cocktail of the most powerful drugs used to treat COVID-19 including plasma therapy, Ramdesivir, blood thinners, steroids, diuretics, multi-vitamins, antacids and medication to manage her BP and thyroid.
Slowly she started settling down & was shifted out of the ICU after 14 days as her dependence on the oxygenator reduced to 3–5 lt/min. Desperate to return home by her third week, she had her first breakdown on her penultimate day in the hospital, sobbing as my sister-in-law and I reasoned with her, unable to commit. However, the next day, we received the best news in weeks that she had tested COVID negative and was given an ok to return. Broken but Stable. Importantly, a Survivor, mom took her first few fragile but determined steps to recovery. After three nerve-wracking weeks, the feeling of seeing her back home is hard to put in words.
The road ahead was tenuous as the shield of specialised doctors was replaced with one skilled nurse and me, a medical novice. I had to learn medical details about mom’s condition & their interconnectedness, how each food affected her recovery, wake up at odd hours and use the oximeter as a guardrail to monitor her recovery. During the first few days of her return we discovered the diuretic intended to drain out the fluid building up in her lungs was causing her to lose electrolytes making her listless and weak. Blood thinners were snuffing out her platelets and her own saturation levels yoyo-ed between 88–94. Her diet needed constant adjustments to strike a balance of electrolytes and help increase her platelet count. For mom too, the first six weeks home were difficult emotionally as she was bed ridden, needing help for everything, something she loathes and goes against her self-reliant fabric
But mom is mentally one of the toughest people I have known, and COVID-19 showed how much of a warrior she is. She’s been putting in an hour of physio every day with dogged determination, lost weight, taking her medication regularly and is eating healthy. Three months since her return, she maintains a saturation of 96+ and needs the oxygenator as an SOS; even her medication has been reduced. The fear of post COVID fibrosis looms with reminders through intermittent cough & breathlessness
Gabriel Marquez noted “The heart’s memory eliminates bad and magnifies good”. One cannot count the numerous blessings we received as a family from known and unknown quarters. The aforementioned cousin & medical fraternity @Bhatia Hospital who saved mom. A sister of a colleague & friend who moved heaven & earth at night to help us get the much-needed plasma. Samaritans who came forward to donate their plasma with no expectations. Mom’s physio who has helped her find new strength! Neighbours who looked after us as their own. Long standing friends always at hand to help and to listen. My organization & manager who let me take extended time off. That friend who provided a cylinder when Mumbai went without electricity for hours. Relatives, friends, colleagues & Buddhist comrades praying hard and long for mom. All the guidance I received based on Nicherin Daishonin’s Buddhist philosophy that helped mould my fear into faith. In a civilisation searching for its’ humanity, we discovered ours in spades!
