It took quite a long, long time and it’s been little steps all the time. Bit by bit things have got better and better. I still, as I say, when I think back to July, August, summertime when I thought I probably felt well, when I think back now, I can see how I was still quite confused doing things and I was probably making mistakes with things. I was still probably suffering with that fatigue really badly and it’s just messing with my head. But actually, in that time I thought I was really good; but now when I think back, and I might even think back in six months’ time oh in January I was still not quite right, I don’t know. And I’ve had to make quite big decisions in business and things, and it’s not been easy, because I look back and I think, oh I didn’t quite get that right and stuff, because my head wasn’t thinking straight.

But I feel pretty good now, apart from my legs and my nerve damage in my feet and arm and hand, but I feel all right. I go and walk five miles a day every day just to try and, sometimes just to straighten my head, but also, I want to get fit. But I find it’s quite difficult to exercise; I get out of breath really, really quickly. I’ve probably never been a big person for doing the gym and things like that, but my body still feels quite weak, even though I do lots and lots of exercise when I get up in the morning because I can hardly move, my legs are so stiff. I do loads and loads of exercises to get myself going. And, as I say, I walk five miles a day. I’m just trying to get myself in better shape.

I think it’s just, even though I don’t feel the fatigue so much now, I still feel concentration is difficult. Even with driving I used to race motorbikes and things, so I could drive very fast, drive really efficiently, quickly; I’m very aware that I’m not as sharp as I used to be. It’s not a bad thing but I just drive really carefully. I just don’t feel as sharp in those things, and I don’t feel as sharp in life as I used to be. But maybe that will get better and better, who knows.

So, you said your family’s mostly back to normal, your husband’s mostly back to normal, but [for] you, things changed, yeah?

Yeah. I mean, it’s as normal as it can be, I suppose, in the current situation. It’s not much different to how it was before. I mean, I think from my perspective, I’m a little more cautious around people, but that’s just that fear of catching it again, which is ridiculous, ‘cause I’ve had my vaccine. He hasn’t. He’s due to get his at the weekend, which is quite nice. But, do you know, it’s funny, so [daughter]'s in secondary school, and she has to lateral flow test twice a week. I find that quite anxiety inducing. Just waiting for that test to tell me that she’s negative. Which is really strange, really strange? But I can feel myself getting anxious in case she’s positive. Again, I can’t rationalise that, there’s no logic behind it or anything like that, but I don’t like doing it, so I suppose that’s it.

But nothing’s changed, and I think that’s the thing as well. It’s almost like you go through this massive event, and then all of a sudden, it’s all back to normal again. And that’s quite disconcerting in itself. I worry about being around people, that’s my main thing. I’m less tearful talking about what happened than I used to be. I am angry, I do hold a lot of kind of anger and resentment around the communication issues at the hospital, that was a big deal. But I’ve had to just turn it round so it’s a positive thing, and I’ll use that in my teaching, and my sort of clinical practice.

Yeah, it’s difficult to know what to say really, because it’s like we’re back to normal, it’s like it didn’t happen. And that’s strange. I actually get a bit bored of him talking about it, is that awful to say? Oh, my God, I mean, he’s going to dine out on it for ages. We talk about this all the time, and it’s again going back to what we were saying, about him saying that whoever at work didn’t have proper Covid, because they weren’t on CPAP or whatever. And I know again, that’s that sense of humour, but actually I just think, let’s not re-traumatise ourselves, let’s not go over it again and again and again. Because I don’t want it to be our defining thing. That’s important, that it doesn’t define who we are, as the family, as a couple, as individuals, ‘cause it shouldn’t, you know? There’s other amazing stuff that happens, and that will happen in our life, and I don’t want that to be it.

I said to myself, when I was, as everyone else, I was asking myself question, why is this happening to me? Why me? I’m young, relatively young, healthy, I have no pre-existing medical conditions. Why I ended up in such a dramatic state. And couple of years ago I read a book in which the author says the, a very important thing which I’m remembering very vividly, namely that when something bad is happening with good people the question that you should ask is not why it is happening to me but the question you should ask is now that this happened, what am I going to do about it? And I said to myself, I’m not going to anchor myself into this horrific experience but I’m going to see in this whole thing. And I said, if my story can be an inspiration to other people, if my story can be a warning to other people, then I’m going to use it as often as possible.

So, I said to myself, I’m going I’m going to go on social media. I’m going to respond to all enquiries from television, radio, newspapers, whoever would like to hear my story.

I’m going to speak on conferences. I’m going to speak or anywhere that they will invite me simply because I felt that so many people, first of all, need a lot of hope because especially in the second and third wave we have seen with the high number and, unfortunately, within my family and circle of friends I had a lot of people not surviving this pandemic. And sharing the kind of hope, sharing the kind of willingness to carry on was so good with a lot of people and on the other hand, telling people my story in a way to express the kind of warning that if this could have if this could happen to me, it could happen to you so take all the precautions. So, when we had only the face mask and the social distancing and washing our hands, I’d been telling people that by wearing a mask don’t look at yourself as a as a victim. Look at yourself as a hero because what is common in heroes, most of them are wearing a mask and they save lives, and this is exactly what you would do when you put on the mask. Maybe without knowing, you save a life or two or may hundreds of lives, or you can make a big, big change in a lot of people’s life by avoiding a possible transmission.

I’ve done the same thing when the vaccines become available. I was backing up this campaign and one of my social media posts was, for example, showing a picture of me back in April 2020 with an oxygen mask on my face and I put the inscription, this was six days after I was tested positive with Covid-19 and another picture from January 2021 completely healthy and smiling and I said, this is six days after I got my vaccine. So, I was I was trying to promote this message that this is the way out of this pandemic by adhering to these measures, by taking the vaccine and this is not just for our own benefit, but we have the kind of social responsibility for others. And it was it was so good to hear a lot of positive feedback from people, from people that I know or even don’t know telling me that, “I’ve took the vaccine because of you.” “I took things more seriously because I’ve heard your story.” And when I when I started receiving this kind of feedbacks, I thought to myself that, and this might sound very weird, that I’m kind of like thankful that I went through this experience. I feel lucky and blessed that I’m alive and still I have a story to tell, and I can make a difference in a lot of people’s life. And looking to this whole experience like this, it’s it just it just puts a smile on my face. I’m not sad. I’m not depressed. I don’t have flashbacks.

I’m not suffering of PTSD. It just makes me happy that through this horrible experience I was able to make a change not only in my own life but hopefully, in hundreds of other people’s lives as well.

So, looking back what would you say is the hardest thing for you?

Oh, well, I think about death a lot, and I’ve been doing that about two or three weeks running up to yesterday being the first anniversary. I think about what would have happened. I shouldn’t put myself through this, but what would have happened, what my wife and my son… Because I spend a lot of time with my son, going to football with him, I go camping with him. He’s now 13. We haven’t went for the last two years. But I think he was about one or nearly two when he first slept under canvas in a tent, and we’ve been going every year since. He loves the outdoors, and I thought who’s going to take him to the football, who’s going to take him to see Hibs, who’s going to take him camping, who’s going to buy him his first pint? Dads are meant to do that, and I might not have been there. I think about that and I torture myself that. I shouldn’t. Maybe that’s still a bit of negativity in me. But I do a lot of thinking, what could have happened. But it’s great to still be here. We’re looking forward to hopefully we’ll get a summer holiday later this year. We normally go to Greece, Kefalonia, that’s a small island in Greece. We’ve went about 19 times now. So we’re looking forward to going back there.

Throughout telling me your story you’ve used the word traumatic a number of times. Would you say it’s been really quite traumatic for you then?

Aye, it’s been traumatic for me. I sometimes think it’s bene more traumatic for my wife having to live through it. I’ve got an excuse, I was in a coma, I don’t remember anything. But she had to. Every time the phone rang at home there’s a split second saying am I going to lift this phone and Paul’s dead, and she’s going to have to explain to my son. So, I sometimes think yes, the person who’s got Covid is in a traumatic situation in ICU, but the family can suffer just as much, maybe physically and mentally.

And after about, I suppose, four months, she needed less of my support and, you know, I had a goal in my mind to give her, her independence as quickly as possible and, you know, I wanted her to do whatever she wanted to do for herself, but then it left a void for me. Because suddenly after all these months of intense worrying about whether she was going to live or die and then months of intense care of looking after her, and then suddenly she was able to do things for herself. And that left a void in my mind, and I became very depressed, you know. It was like all the air going out of a balloon, I guess, you could say. And of course, I’d given up work, I decided to retire early. You know, it wasn’t the right time, but I decided to because financially we lost so much the previous year, it was very difficult. We lost everything and I couldn’t get any support because I was a limited company. So, there was no furlough or anything. But anyway. But I was very depressed for about six to eight weeks.

I didn’t speak to the doctor or anything, but I found it very difficult within myself now that I suddenly had some time to myself. I was lost. And then I became angry and frustrated with people because I felt that we got through this Covid and, you know, we survived it, but I felt that people around us were becoming lackadaisical with it all again and not focusing on the problem of the ill-; Because in my mind, I knew it would never go away because I knew… Because it’s a virus, it’s always going to mutate. I know that much, you know, and it would always be a threat for years to come until medication can deal with it, you know, like we do the flu now.

And I just get… I was getting angry with my children the grandchildren and they were just sort of… It’s like nothing had happened, you know. I always felt people were behaving as nothing had happened, you know, and I couldn’t cope with it. I couldn’t cope with it because I’d put so much in to, you know, trying to get Veronica back and other people were getting on with their lives and I couldn’t. I couldn’t do it.

You know, it was really, really hard. And I still feel like it today quite a lot. It’s intense inside me. I worry about it every day and I see people out on the streets and in shops and no one’s got a mask on, or no one puts any gel on their hands when they enter a premises or anything and I just feel so angry, you know. I don’t want to feel like that because I’m not an angry person. My strength is for being so placid and calm, you know, but this has changed me completely.

Do you feel like Covid has affected the way you look at yourself or you think about yourself?

Sadly, yes. It’s made a different level to my situation. One, I think you try to live as you did before but it’s in a totally different way. You have to do things totally differently and respect your body a bit more. But also find out that you can’t do what you used to be able to do. So, it changes that reflection on life. Find things to do, i.e. I’m reading a book about Ranulph Fiennes, an explorer. I don’t know if you’ve heard about him. No? Well, he crossed the Antarctic on more than one occasion, on several occasions, in different formats. People like that can give you a bit of inspiration, you know.

You realise that you have to get up and carry on, is the important thing. My wife’s good for that. I can always honestly say that you know… We’re very much still in love and she’s been excellent all the way through. But we help one another as well and I tend to do a lot more in house than I did before, because I’m more confined to the house situation, rather than being out and about. So that is an important one. You do have to change your attitude towards it.

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.

You mentioned before that you feel guilty that this affects the whole family, is that something…?

Yeah, I think it’s definitely something that’s stayed with me. I feel like, without meaning, I kind of dragged them on a horrible journey, and I know that I didn’t do anything to cause it, but I still feel like they were massively affected by it. But, I mean, I think a year on, everybody has a better understanding and they’ve been very understanding with me. But I definitely think that it’s touched our family in a way that’s sort of changed it forever. But not any more so than, you know, if my husband was suddenly diagnosed with something, or something else happened, but I think Covid was a different kind of journey, because it was dramatic, because it was in the press so much, because it was so unknown, I guess it’s different than something like maybe a cancer journey or another type of journey where maybe the family would have had support and understood more. Even the people that were looking after me didn’t understand. So, I think it was just a very unknown journey, but I definitely feel guilty, but sometimes I feel like it’s kind of a wasted emotion, because I can’t change anything about what happened.

I think the emotional effect on the family was intense. And in a way that is ignored; they were not offered any support. And again, [name charity] was the only person who offered them any support. [name charity] set up just a very simple online chat group of relatives, partners and relatives of people who had suffered these strokes, and I know a lot of people felt it was very helpful. I haven’t asked detailed questions because I think that’s inappropriate, but I know a lot of people found it tremendously helpful. But they received, other than that, no help, yet they were the ones, they were quite often the principal carers, they were having to deal with the shock of having a close family member very ill, then being told in some cases their husband may well die, then being told actually he’s all right but he’s not really all right.

And also, I think it was the fact that nobody sat down with them – I’m not saying they should have done – but nobody sat down and said, this is what’s wrong with your husband or this is what’s wrong with your wife. And so they’ve had to find out for themselves what’s wrong. And there’s no real help to say, look, this is normal or… [Inaudible] So, that has created, certainly with me and my wife, tensions. Again because I don’t look different, so I might be saying something and my wife will be saying, but hold on a minute, you never used to deal with things like that. And I’m thinking, I’m not doing anything different. It takes an awful lot of effort to work out whether I’m doing things differently because of the strokes, I’m doing things differently because I’m at home and not at work, I’m doing things differently because I’m not hearing things in the same way. And in fact in our case we have hired a psychologist to work with us privately to try and get through some of these issues because they’re very difficult.

Stephanie: But I remember also as well when you’re sort of asking Peter how, how he felt afterwards I can remember saying to him after he’d regained consciousness I’m not really gonna tell you anything about what’s happened to you yet but when you come home I’ll tell you everything in minute detail and at the time he said I don’t really think I want to know but since then I’ve told him, I said I’d tell him in little bits and since then you know everything now don’t you?

Peter: More or less, yeah

Stephanie: He knows almost everything now but at the time when, when he first came home from hospital, I think he, he just didn’t, he didn’t want to know what had happened

Peter: I think that was a time when I was just glad to be alive I didn’t want to be taken back with all the nitty gritty details I just wanted to start moving on, you know, that had gone, stuff it, that had gone I don’t want to know about that I just want to know what’s coming tomorrow and the day after, but then since, since I was getting better you know, I, told me little bits, bits and bobs, now I think I know everything.

Stephanie: I think you needed to understand what …

Peter: Yeah it’s like, like a learning curve, like a new born baby it’s like, you know, you’re just growing again and learning [cutting out] I mean in your life I see [cutting out]

And did you want to know at any point, or did it just happen?

Peter: Sorry?

Did you want to know at any point?

Peter: Oh yeah I definitely wanted to know more and more and more [cutting out] to know what Steph ’s… really definitely [cutting out] you know, because I can think, well I was in hospital [cutting out] and she was on her own for five months, you know, but then to know what I went through I can appreciate what she went through and it’s important I think to talk about these things and find out where everybody was at that particular time, you know, it’s like it was just a simple fact that you needed, or I needed to know where Steph was when I was going through and… me going through that although I can’t remember much apart from these bloody dreams [laughter] yes.

When you left the hospital or when you were discharged from the ward did, they give you any summaries of your clinical notes?

Yeah. It wasn’t for a couple of months after that someone got in touch with me, seen how I was doing, and she asked me if it would be useful did I want to know what actually happened to me in hospital. It was like a small diary of what happened. I said, oh, I’d love to, because I need to fill in the gaps. I need to find out what happened on one particular day. Because my wife never kept one, and she sometimes can’t remember on what day this happened or what day that happened. So the critical care nurse sent out something to me and I read it and I thought wow. I knew I was seriously ill, but it put it into a bit more perspective. I could see on what day, and they gave me a note of what medicines I had and what machines I was on and how I responded to the machines and who was taking care of me and stuff like that, which I thought was a good idea because it helped me fill in some gaps.

The gaps are difficult, I understand.

Yes. Aye. There’s a lot of blank spaces. And it goes some way to helping understand what happened.

Victor: I’m back in the game. We’ve got this lovely photograph, on the phone. I tried to get it printed up, but it… This was one of the best days of my life. It was when I was well enough to go out and it was…some of the Covid restrictions had been lifted…

Paula: Yeah.

Victor: …which enabled us to accept the invitation from friends to go round and have a cup of tea and a cream cake, right? But what was nice was putting nice clothes back on again, rather than just sit around like this or with a scruffy tracksuit on. But that’s…I tried to get that printed up but it didn’t come out very well. It looks good on the phone. That’s as we were about to leave. We were only going round our friends’ for two hours. We ended up round there five or six. And that’s…that day, there, just being smart again. And compared to a couple of weeks previous to that I look a million dollars, compared to what I looked like. That’s a nice memory, a really nice memory. Yeah.