Matthew

Gender: Male
Ethnicity: White British
Background: Matthew is 38 years old and is White British. He is married, with two children, and works as a senior IT developer.

Matthew remembers first hearing about a new virus in Feburary 2020. Shortly afterwards he developed flu symptoms and was advised by a GP to go to hospital. After some tests he was diagnosed with having liver abcesses and was admitted for treatment. He became increasingly unwell while he was in hospital, and was soon moved to ICU. When he improved, he was moved back to the liver ward where he started to get a fever again. After some further tests a nurse told him that he had Covid. Matthew recalls thinking to himself I’m not coming back from this because I’m already so low;. He didn’t expect that his body would be able to recover from Covid as well as his liver issues. At the point that he caught Covid the hospital introduced a visitor ban because of lockdown, so his parents and wife could no longer visit him.

Matthew was moved to a Covid ward and spent four weeks on oxygen. He felt lucky that he did not get intubated. He remembers feeling quite fine; in himself while he had Covid, with his main symtpoms being high temperature and sweating, but thinks that at the time he couldn’t really tell the different between feeling bad and good;. When he recovered from Covid he was able to return to the liver ward, where he had to continue to have treatment for his liver abscesses and a haematoma that had developed, as well as have fluid removed from one lung. At one point he had so many tubes coming out of him that he felt like some kind of bionic man, half human;.

After three months in total he was able to return home, where he was excited to see his wife and two children. His daughter had been born a few months before he went to hospital, and he was disappointed to have missed so much of her early life while he was in hospital. One of the doctors joked about how unlucky he had been, but Matthew disagreed. He felt lucky to have been able to walk out of hospital.

Matthew noticed some long term impacts of his time in hospital. His right lung doesn’t work as well as it used to, and he can’t be as active as he would like. He also lives with pain from his haematoma. He lost thirty kilos of weight in hospital and said people didn’t recognize me anymore;. Working from home has made things easier, as he has been able to rest more easily when he needs to. Reflecting on a future with Covid, he described feeling that Covid is with us forever; and that life has to move on.

Matthew thought that because the virus ‘didn’t take me’ when he was at his worst, a future infection would likely be much milder.

Age at interview 38

I mean I’ve been double jabbed. I’ve already had the illness and I had the illness when I was at my very, very lowest. And I, you know, if it couldn’t take me then, I just don’t think it’s going to take me now. I think if I was to get it again, it would just be very mild. I’d self-isolate and that would be that. But I very much firmly strongly believe that the reality is that this disease is with us forever now and as difficult and as tragic as it is, you know, life has to move on. And, you know, what seventy thousand people a year die from flu and that’s a terrible statistic but I personally, I just want to get back to living life normally. But I can understand people being worried about it.

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Matthew attended a clinic with Covid symptoms and felt that how the staff responded was ‘like a movie’.

Age at interview 38

It was really surreal. You know, it almost felt like pandemic movies, like all of a sudden, this has become a lot more real because I thought to myself, if this was a normal virus, they would have just seen me in a normal room, done everything normally, you know. People go into the GPs with all kinds of viruses and bacteria, which can be caught, nobody pays any attention. And I thought there must be something really truly bad about this virus if she won’t even touch me or come near me. If I’m being forced to sit in this room and you know, and that was reinforced more when I was actually in hospital and they were just doing their tests. They tested me for flu and they tested me for the Covid and then that that’s when a doctor came in, she didn’t have a mask on, but she was saying, “No, no, no, you can’t be here. You know, what are you doing walking in here like this? You’ve got to be outside. We’re going to have to put you in a hazmat suit.” Turns out I didn’t have Covid, at that time.

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Matthew discussed the pandemic with colleagues, listened to the BBC and read different newspapers to get a variety of perspectives.

Age at interview 38

You know, I work in an open office next to eight other people and we were just talking about it and we were just discussing how crazy it was that there was this new virus. I was joking with people saying, “Well, we are due a virus because they come along, you know, every hundred years.” You have to look at the Spanish flu and then before that there was another flu. And I was totally unconcerned about it because I thought, yeah, whatever it is, it can’t be that bad, you know. Maybe there’s a few restrictions but I never envisaged the whole country would lockdown and that we would still be suffering with the consequences of it. But, in terms of actual research, it was just what I was reading on the BBC or the Guardian. I like to read the BBC, the Guardian and the Daily Mail so I get a different viewpoint on all the news.

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