Has Covid affected your perceptions of yourself?

When I was in hospital, my husband and I both said that things were going to change. And they did for a while. Things like helping the kids out with money, which we wouldn’t normally have done, which we have done. [Husband] said, we don’t need the money…well, we do obviously but he said, you know, they need it. So, we helped each one of them out a bit.

And I think…well, I know it brought me and my husband a lot closer. I mean, we’ve been together 47 years and we spoke about things that we’ve never talked about before. I can’t even remember now what it was, but I know…yeah, it has changed us, definitely. Yeah, that’s because of that near-death experience and my husband thought he was going to lose me. I mean, we’ve been married 44 years, so it’s a long time.

That is a long time, yeah.

Yeah. And yeah, it’s definitely brought us closer together. And things that should have been said a long time ago that weren’t said that we’ve talked about. Yeah, so it has changed us. For the better, I don’t know. Hopefully. Yeah, I’m sure it has. Yeah.

What has life been like for you since you got home?

Frustrating because I can’t do things I want to do. I get tired quickly. Like I said, I’m wheelchair-bound anyway because I’ve got severe osteoarthritis and one leg I’ve got a metal pole from my hip to my ankle, so I can’t bend that. But I can potter around and do things, but I try to do simple things, you bend down to do something and, oh, you’re out of breath again.

And it’s just frustrating. So, I’ve sat and done a lot of knitting. Having things to do, like I like doing crossword puzzles and I used to hate doing word search. But while I was in hospital, having word search to do, you didn’t have to think too hard about it, but it takes your mind…I think if I didn’t have things to do, I would have gone mad, I think. I lent a man my tablet so he could watch some films because he had nothing to do, so…and I was knitting and doing the word search. And it’s just, keep yourself positive really, trying to have positive thoughts and keeping your mind active. Otherwise, you just lay there and think about what’s wrong with you and I don’t think that helps. So yeah.

And now they just tell me it’s time, they say it can take five years before you’re totally over it. But I’ll just take each day as it comes and do what I can do and what I can’t do, I’ll have to leave ‘til tomorrow. So yeah, it’s getting better. So, each day is a new day and you improve each day. Some days you think you’ve gone 10 paces forward and nine back but then other days you think you’ve gone 10 and stayed at 10, so yeah.

It’s hard work recovering?

It is. And my husband, he’s still tired, you know, he said he’s exhausted. He does a bit in the garden and he’s coming back in and sitting down and falling asleep a lot more. Yeah.

What was it like for you to go to the [general] ward after that? Sometimes patients find that quite a big difference.

I was quite relieved to know that I was well enough to go back to the ward because I kept thinking…because they kept me in ICU, I kept thinking, am I ever going to get out of here. And when they said I could go back to the ward, I knew that must have been a good improvement to be able to do that. And then when I got to the ward, you’re still in a separate part where you’re monitored more than…in one bay, you’re monitored more carefully. And then when you improve a bit, then you go to another bay where they don’t have to keep such an eye on you all the time.