Bangalore based journalist, L Subramani, who lost his vision to retinitis pigmentosa as a teenager, writes how he survived the horrors of being alone in a covid-19 isolation ward and facing death of fellow warrior.
Room 209 had a single bed and a side bench. It faced up to a busy road where you could hear the constant rumbling of traffic and the wailing ambulance, far too often for my comfort.
The hospital was generally silent, except for the violent coughing fit of a fellow covid-19 patient coming from the nearest room and the ‘beep…beep’ of the ventilator - constant reminders that you’re in a containment zone where people are fighting for their lives and to retain their sanity. The only saving grace was that the hospital allowed me to carry my laptop and mobile phone, so that I could watch videos, write or read news.
When I got bored of writing or listening, I put the devices aside and thought how exactly I managed to land in the passage to hell on the pandemic highway? I stayed indoors for nearly 200 days, avoided meeting outsiders and kept up my walking routine (the only exercise I manage to do) precisely to avoid the time at the hospital as covid-19 patient.
From the mid-March, as I began work from home at the comfort of my family home in Chennai, till the first week of August, there seemed no danger of me contracting the virus.
Getting infected
But all hell broke loose on August 3, when my aunty, dad’s older brother’s wife, passed away at 78 in Srirangam, the temple town nearly 324-kilometres from Chennai. My 84-year-old uncle was left alone with her body. The trove of relatives, including my brother and cousin, started for Srirangam the same evening. They helped uncle cremate aunty and brought him home on August 5. He was old and was nowhere to go. We, as his brother’s children, were the only relatives in the position to shelter him.
On August 10, five days after my uncle had arrived, I woke up from the afternoon siesta with a scratchy throat and a mild fever of 100.2 Fahrenheit. The fever was on and off and the discomfort came and went. I felt completely alright one moment and then disappeared behind the bathroom door to spit out the little deposit of phlegm from my throat. When someone asked me about the symptoms, I blamed it on the change in weather.
I wasn’t too shocked when the test results were positive. But the scan of my lungs revealed that the virus had infected nearly 40%. Though doctors officially adviced home quarantine, there were concerns that a sudden drop in blood oxygen levels would lead to breathlessness. Hospitals deal with too many emergency cases and no one was sure if I’d get a bed and a ventilator if I take a chance and stay home.
Meanwhile, we seriously debated over who brought the virus. I was fairly sure that uncle had passed it to me, but in reality, it could’ve been anyone of those who made that 324-kilometer journey to Srirangam.
August 17: My uncle complained of breathlessness and was sent to a private hospital on an ambulance. We kept getting the news that he was stable and was off the ventilator.
Admitted to hospital
I’m headed to the hospital and should spend time in complete isolation. My mom, daughter or aunty won’t be around to assure me I was getting better. I won’t smell coffee brewing in the kitchen, the sound of pressure cooker releasing the steam with the wonderful aroma of rice and dal. In its place there’ll be the smell of disinfectant.
This was the first time, however, I stepped into a health facility with the prospect of people recoiling, and not coming forward, to help a blind man yet to acclimatize with the new environment. This was also, perhaps, for the first time, that someone would hold the opposite end of my white stick, and not my hand, making me feel dangerously untouchable in an unfamiliar environment.
For a blind man who thrived on touch to convey a rainbow of emotions, right from assurance to the depth of ones love, the prospect of having to communicate with people from a distance was heartbreaking.
A sense of awareness about my surrounding replaced fear. I thanked the almighty for my blindness because there won’t be any lasting image of this dreadful place lodging itself in my brain cells. It also kept my sense of smell and sound pretty strong. I noticed the screeching rubber wheels of a rolling cart the nurses took along while checking the patient’s vitals.
Blindness also meant that the hospital staff would only have voices and no other human qualities. My brain would usually assign a face to the voice I hear, but on this occasion, it stubbornly refused to create faces and characteristics for the people.
Meeting uncle in hospital
A brief meeting with my uncle and back to isolation again
Uncle’s only shortcoming was his difficulties in hearing. “Soon as he gets out of the hospital, we should get him a hearing aid,” my brother was telling us. I agreed since I knew how isolated and aloof uncle might feel without participating in dinner-time conversations and without the audio on the television serials, which he watched sometimes.
“We had to put him on ventilator when he came in here three days ago and never thought he’d recover so quickly. Now, he’s fine even without high-flow nasal cannula,” the doctor said, picking up my file.
I seemed to have discovered the best way to counter the anxieties about covid-19: busying myself with blowing the spirometer, checking Google News on the phone, writing the emailer for my next webinar or watching movies I enjoyed as a kid in the eighties. I played music that spurred me on to work and even did a little wriggle of the hips, about the only dance move I could manage.
Across the empty room, uncle and I exchanged a few half-gestured and half-spoken words. When I needed to locate the bathroom entrance, uncle would promptly sit up and let me know if I was a few steps back or forward.
“You’re doing very well,” the doctor told me the next afternoon. “I’m happy to say that your uncle is doing extremely well…” “If everything goes well, I’ll also discharge your uncle with you. The good news is, he has also tested negative,” the doctor said.
Discharged from hospital
I woke up with fresh energy on Wednesday. It was nearly a week since I arrived and the day the doctor has marked for my discharge. I slipped into a new t-shirt, smiling to myself that it’d be the last time I was bathing and changing clothes in the crampy room.
My cousin Narasimhan’s call provided the last confirmation. He’d come at 8 o’clock in the evening with Swamy to take me home. The ordeal was well and truly over.
Passing through the corridor for the last time, I felt something was amiss though I wasn’t exactly able to put my finger on what it was. ‘Uncle’. As my fellow covid-19 patient who bravely fought the disease and recovered, I found uncle to be a fellow soldier in the war against the coronavirus. Our shared fears and frustrations bonded us stronger than before and I badly wanted to know whether he was getting discharged as well.
“The doctor wants to keep him for a day to fix his prostate. He’ll be back home tomorrow,” Narasimhan said.
Uncle was well, after all, and needs a bit of time to get some minor medical issues addressed and return home. It should be ok, and I’d soon see my fellow corona warrior, or at least hear him from the next room.
I woke up to activities outside the room early on Saturday and knew straight away that my family was preparing to shift uncle back home and isolate him the room next to my own that also had a bathroom. I recalled the picture of uncle lying down with the oxygen mask strapped to his nose. If covid-19 posed a big challenge for someone who’s forty-seven and blind, it would’ve been an even greater ordeal for an eighty-four-year-old. It would’ve been a greater relief for someone like uncle to come home. I was going mad, not knowing what was taking so much time to bring uncle home.
I summoned sis-in-law with insistent door knocks. “No news about uncle as of now,” she shouted through the closed door.
Just then, my iPhone rang, cutting off the music. I ran towards the bed, groped for the phone in frustration and finally managed to pick it up and tab frantically at the answer button.
“Ask Mahesh (my brother) to keep his phone free. I’ve been trying to call and…” I cut off Narasimhan and asked what was going on.
Fellow warrior no more
“Uncle’s dead,” he said without preamble.
“Are you sure? He…tested negative for covid-19. Is it not?” I asked a bit too loudly than intended.
“Yes. The doctor said he reported breathlessness about an hour back and was rushed into the ICU. The CPR procedure didn’t work,” he said.
I yanked open the door and shouted the news to my brother Mahesh. “Speak to Narasimhan. Speak right now. Uncle’s dead,” I told him.
“What?” he stopped his phone conversation and asked in confusion.
Even as the grief of losing my fellow warrior engulfed me, I couldn’t help thinking if my recovery was also false. Because uncle tested negative for covid-19 and died unexpectedly, just when it appeared, he was almost totally recovered from the deadly infection. Was it possible to survive covid-19 and die suddenly?
I hurried up to my laptop and googled about deaths that happen after a patient tests covid negative. About 12,000 results flooded my screen. When I read coronavirus attack cells in blood vessels, cause inflammations and result in heart attacks. Some researchers insisted that it should be treated as a multi-system disease.
At 5 pm, my brother and cousin Narasimhan sat in an ambulance carrying uncle’s body that headed towards the crematorium. I didn’t go there…I couldn’t. The damn virus tied me to the room and there was no way I could say a proper goodbye to my fellow covid warrior, who followed his wife of 58 years to the other world in just 26 days.
I wouldn’t like anyone to experience what I did in that hospital and feel the pain of loss as I did just last month.
Stay safe, stay positive and help those fighting coronavirus. The battle isn’t over yet.
This has been adapted with Subramani's permission from his 6 part blog on his Covid-19 experience.
