Coronavirus Colombia: man with stress box survived covid-19 after six days in intensive care – Health

A river of blood. A flow with no beginning or mouth, just a constant and turbulent flow. That image exploded with every second Ricardo Maldonado squinted in a nightmare that lasted about three hours. In the midst of the forced quiet, I woke up in the bed of an Intensive Care Unit (ICU) from sleep induced but unconscious to understand that this moment was the beginning of the end: survived the most difficult phase of covid-19.

That river – perhaps more than a hallucination, the microscopic view of the chemistry that took place in his body – is the snapshot of his hospitalization that he remembers most today, more than two months after returning home to resume his life with his wife and son, Gerónimo, aged two and a half. It wasn’t easy.

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All three were infected with the coronavirus in late June. They do not know how he got to his home, in Bogotá, where they were doing their isolation, although it is clear that the first was Gerónimo, who manifested himself as “a little catch”; her, stronger, but treatable at home with inhalers.

This was not the case for Ricardo, 43, a squash player and cycling enthusiast, who was hospitalized for 13 days, six of them in intensive care, connected to a respirator and during a deep sleep.

Today he says he is almost completely fine, but at night he still needs to connect to oxygen because he is still breathing very slowly. Of course, recovering a lot of things that Ricardo previously took for granted took a lot of effort.

(Also: the reunion of a mother and her baby after defeating the covid together).

“It took me three weeks to get free handwriting back. The head thinks slowly for a couple of weeks. I just got out of the ICU, I was talking readeee slowly, so, so slowly. That lasts like three or four days, “he explains. The writing thing comes with recovery.” It’s a slow time where you have to go back and relearn a lot and it’s only possible judiciously with therapy and exercise. ” .

His picture was more complicated than that of many covid-19 patients, although he had no comorbidities: “I’m not fat, I’m over seven kilos, but I work out; I used to do squash three times a week. I didn’t smoke, I didn’t. I drank liqueurs but a wine in the end. None of this. ”

The factor of imbalance, he believes, and from what the doctors have told him, could be stress: “Maybe this had completely weakened me. It may or may not be, maybe I was somatizing, the stress is not evident to me.”

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At the moment of answering this call, Ricardo rings on the other side of the horn like what they call multitasking: he has to hold the cell phone by his neck because he feels that with one hand he is cooking and with the other he prevents Gerónimo from putting the hands in a jar. It is 4 pm, so he has been dealing with it for several hours since the morning with virtual lessons in the garden. A normal “boleo” of quarantined parents.
Also, a very precious father and son time who has already repaired the 13 days he missed the little one at home, plus that previous stormy goodbye – the most distressing moment of my life, he calls it – before being hospitalized: ” Despite the fact that Gero was happy (when he came back) because he wanted to hug me, he didn’t have his father for two weeks, so it took him another 8 days to get comfortable. “

Paradoxically, Ricardo Maldonado spent this nightmare in an ICU for children (before, he spent three days in intermediate care). By that time, in mid-July, the beds and respirators in the adult room of the Fundación Neumológica were already occupied and there was only the room where pediatric emergencies are usually attended.

“There were two children who had comorbidities, one a year and a half and another five, and the others were old, some my age and some 60 and over“The intensivists who treated them were pediatric patients who had to accept the challenge because, given the lack of doctors, someone had to do it.

(In other news: “The silence you hear is terrifying.”)

When they informed him that they should intubate him, the worst ideas came to mind: “There I had the phone and I was able to call home. Then I told the doctors ‘I don’t want to know anything, I don’t want to know anything’, because I had heard that there are people who want to be conscious (while connecting to the respirator), but I understand that this is not possible “.

“That night (July 9th) I was intubated, went to bed on Friday night and woke up on July 15th“Induced sleep is not the same as being in a coma, but there are similarities:” The body does not function in those six days, which for other patients may be less or many more, depending on the case. What is needed at that time is for the body and the fan to understand each other, they explained. The mental process doesn’t work; sphincters. There are five or six connections when you are in deep sleep. You don’t think, you don’t go to the bathroom, you don’t feel. Nothing”.

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During that “blackout” period, he was given a drug called Risperidone, which is used to treat Alzheimer’s.

He assures that doctors and nurses took three attempts to wake him up: “They said it was very difficult (…) Imagine anything and your head doesn’t control anything.” At the moment, He still had the tube in his mouth, which he had been with for six hours, some of those haunted by those images of the river of blood.

“I don’t remember if it was in my dreams, it must have been, but rI remember going to the ICU where I was and coming back, and it was very strange because when I opened my eyes I saw exactly the same thing: the children’s room; I remember walking it but I mustn’t have done it, “he says. In just six days he lost 10 kilos.

(Read on: The Torture of Having Your Mother Between Life and Death).

From there began a four-day process in which yes, there was hope and even desperation to get out of it, but, says Ricardo, also a feeling of desolation which then turns into depression.

“It’s just that the first two days I couldn’t do anything alone, muscle mass is lost a lot. Neither pee alone nor bathe (…) When you get up you have a feeling of laziness and heaviness. Risperidone has altered my sleep, it is also that in intermediate care sleep is a luxury. Furthermore, there is no appetite, we eat because we play and the throat takes two or three days to recover “.

Go back home

The first sign of relief for Ricardo at the clinic was that he could actually start walking on his own.

“There you want to leave immediately. In my case, you know it is easier to recover at home than in the hospital and when you are told you can go it is an obsession, even if seven hours pass between orders and exams, but it is” Accelerate ” Ricardo says “my wife had to go with Gero to the hospital to pick me up because since the three of us had covid, no one can take care of the baby: neither grandparents nor uncles”.

The entrance to the house brought mixed feelings: “One arrives made of an old rag, it’s awful, it takes another two days to be able to move around by yourself, get dressed. The bathroom is sitting, the first three days in the house I could not get the soap “.

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Pride played tricks on him too: “You don’t want to ask for help at 2am. But that’s okay because it makes you want to improve faster.”
However, for him the most complex part of those first few weeks was feeling his “head out of place: insomnia, terrible sleepless nights, anxieties and anxieties about the future and the past”.

Four weeks after being home, the first examination revealed that he still had “traces of ground glass”; namely the spoils of the effect of the disease, the trace that the coronavirus has crossed the body, has left, but has left its marks.

Another sequel: the social

Ricardo took painstaking efforts to get out of the problem and recover what was lost. He wants to get back to squash, even though the courts were closed until recently, and he has been training on his stationary bike for weeks – 40 minutes now – but he is eager to get back on the road, short distances first.

You also feel ready to go to work, but he was unemployed at the very beginning of the pandemic, as the administrative director of an events agency that suffered direct assault on that sector which was paralyzed. Covid-19 also carries social stigmas.

“Before entering the ICU I was applying for a position that seemed very interesting and that I wanted. At home, I came to the virtual interview and had the cannula in place, and the person who interviewed me looked at me and said” Thing? You got it? “With total naturalness I replied:” I’m post covid “…

– “Did you have covid? Well, thank you very much, have a nice day.”
“And so far the interview. It seems incredible to me that with so much information around the world these things happen,” he muses.

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The multitasking dad is sure that, more than two months after his illness, he can now work in the office without problems. “I have no idea what it would be like if it were for the jobs I had before, like selling raw materials for food and driving 500km a week. If I did, I’d have to get used to it, but taking a bus, no problem.”

Today Ricardo calmly recounts the whole experience, even if he speaks little to other former covids, only a relative who also had a hard time moving forward. “I am grateful that I had a very good condition, as I was treated at the Neumological Foundation”.

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He feels that the transition to ICU hasn’t changed him as a person: “These are very intense moments in which you start to think differently and understand what you are living in unconscious somehow He cannot stop living it but must learn to diminish it, not to suffer so much (…) It makes us more aware that there is no human being who is exempt from anything “.

CARLOS SOLANO / TIME
TIME
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