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.

Well with proning you need to put your hands above your head or in a position that you feel comfortable with, turn over onto your belly, so that you’re belly-down and then have some pillows to keep your head further up, if you will. And do it for at least, if you can, a couple of hours. It sounds a long time but eventually you get so used to it that you fall asleep. And you might fall asleep and do it more than two hours. But basically, it’s just a question of…

I always sleep on my back; I always have done, like I’m in a coffin, with my feet out of bed because they don’t like the quilt, because of the arthritis and things in my toes and that. I have a bit of neuropathy as well, at the bottom of my feet. But that’s basically the stance that you have to use. And the longer you do it, the better. And so, I felt that it would possibly be important that I try to carry on, because I still wasn’t… I probably did it for another eight weeks while I was at home and then I felt that was enough and went back to normal. And now I’m just living with it, so I’m okay. So yeah, that’s proning.

Independently you’ve got to, slowly but surely, get yourself back into things and start doing things. I get out, I go and have a drink or maybe do a bit of shopping now and things like that. But it’s probably taken the first…December, January, into probably February before I started even thinking about just going out, so forth. And then I’d sit down and have to rest again. And I’m still probably 80 per cent of the time at home. I don’t want to be but some days I don’t feel as though I could go out and do anything. Even the last two days I’ve been pretty well exhausted, sleeping. I can sleep quite easily, and my wife will say… I’m on a lot of medication.

I’ll just… Yeah, I’ve just put a few things down such as… My kidney function was not working well while I was in hospital. And I suffer with diabetes, so those two things will have an effect on my body. So that was another reason why they wouldn’t send me home. Eventually they gave me something to be able to cope with that situation. The tiredness, like I said, is still there. Brain fog and doing things, you know, and forgetting…set off to do something and forget where you’re going and then have to come back and relay your thoughts to… Yeah, I’ve got to go and do that. That’s a thing that occurs all the time, unfortunately.

Can you say a bit more about the brain fog?

Yeah. I may go in the kitchen even and go to get something and I’ll go in the wrong cupboard or forget why I was going into that cupboard. Right silly things sometimes. And then when you’re going to start to make a conversation and then it completely goes, and you have to sit for quite a while before you could think about it and start explaining yourself again. And it doesn’t make sense, you know, because you think I was fine before all this, you know, where’s it all gone to.

And unfortunately, like, my mother has dementia. And so, it’s been tough while I’ve been like this. I do still go round but my wife has taken over the lead of that and looking after her, due to the fact that, obviously, I can’t get out like I used to. And I suppose the memory thing, the brain fog, it comes and goes, shall we say. It's not there all the time. And I think you’ve got to just reset yourself and be a bit stronger and then you find that you can go ahead and do something.

I think what strikes me in your story is you were both so unwell at the same time. So, when the ambulance came, they must have seen her…

Yes, they took me away and at the same time said to my wife I’m afraid your oxygen levels aren’t right, you’re not well, we’d better get an ambulance for you as well. So, we both got taken away at the same time. But she was definitely, that weekend, more poorly than myself. I was still moving about and doing things and then all of a sudden it seemed to hit me. Obviously, probably, because we were still in the same bedroom together and I, possibly earlier, should have gone into the other room. But at the time I was looking after my wife, so you just carry on.

Yeah, it is one of these things, right? It’s just very impossible to take care of somebody without being physically close to them, so… Yeah.

Yeah, I should have got all the gear on, shouldn’t I, and put the mask on and…? But you don’t start doing that, do you? We’ve been together a long time. We’ve been married 40 years, you know, and so we know one another. Which is important as well, isn’t it? And you can see when one another is not well or there is something wrong. So, you try to help the other person out and that’s how relationships work, isn’t it? So that’s what you do. And then next news, you know, we were both poorly, so there was no choice in the matter, you know.

Yes. And how do you think it affected your ability to take care of each other after you came back from hospital?

Well, it was interesting that my wife decided to get my eldest son involved to help me. She wasn’t fit enough to manage on her own and, like I say, she did say that she slept it off and she felt okay in herself. And she wasn’t as debilitated as me. She wasn’t breathless or… and the ironic thing is that as a child my wife had bronchitis, which was quite… you know, the chest and everything. That didn’t affect her in that way. So Covid’s a strange phenomenon.