Coronavirus Colombia: patients who have overcome covid-19 tell their stories – Health

Curated by: Diana Milena Ravelo Méndez

In Greek, Nicolás means: “the victory of the people”, which is why her newborn son could not have had a better name for Yina Moreno. From before she was born, he was already waging a life-and-death battle with her. Mother and son became the first case of a pregnant woman at high risk of dying from covid-19 at the Cafam clinic in Bogotá, a clinical picture that appeared to be taken from one of those medical literature articles in which what is been experienced by the pandemic in other countries. It was no longer a distant reality. Her health was so bad that doctors had to, as she put it, “urgently remove the baby.”

By Carlos Solano

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

By María Paulina Ortiz

Doctor René Pedraza came to the emergency room of the Clínica del Country with his son. This remembers him accurately. From then on, nothing is clearer to him than what happened: until fifty-five days later, when he managed to get out of the intensive care unit.

By Carlos Francisco Fernández

“Doctor, it looks like he has covid,” the emergency doctor told his colleague Carlos Alberto Arango Villegas. They were in the emergency room of the San Ignacio hospital, which he had headed until a few months ago.

Although the words fell like an arrow, he ended up thinking that perhaps it was an exaggeration or an excess of care by the doctor who was treating him. And although he felt a little cough and a little fever, he felt really good.

By Andrés Rivera

Surely, when you read this story, you will be terrified.
You will feel that it is a terrible drama and probably the same thing that happened to me will happen to you: you will believe that it is something far away that you will not have to live. They may have heard that a friend of a friend, or a neighbor’s cousin, tested positive for COVID-19. But they will calm down because this, to you and your loved ones, will not happen to you. And it will be normal. I thought the same.
I’ll tell you how covid attacked us in my family with its most painful symptom. Which? The miserable uncertainty.

Edited by: José Alberto Mojica

Its history is the same as all those infected with covid-19. Symptoms of a normal flu: headache and pain in the bones, nasal congestion, cough, a slight fever. Nothing that couldn’t be solved with a flu, he thought. Or with an injection of the kind they give him in a drugstore in the Diana Turbay neighborhood, in the steep and abandoned hills of southern Bogota. But nothing worked. The temperature was a runaway train. The cough was a machine gun. He lost his senses of taste and smell.

By Julián Ríos

His legs tremble when he walks. His left arm, which for months hadn’t had enough strength to even lift his cell phone, now holds the cane that has become an extension of his body. His lungs, which look like a pair of raisins on X-rays, are unable to travel more than three blocks. But Kevin Cardona is alive and this, in his case, is a feat for some and a miracle for others.