My daughter Josie got very ill in 2017 and I had to pretty much live in the ICU ward of the Royal Children's Hospital in Melbourne. Her heart got attacked by a virus/bacteria , possibly the flu, though we'll never know because she was too damaged to take a biopsy. At one stage she had forty doctors working on her. She was put on a special treatment called extra corporeal life support (ECMO) that requires 24 hour, extremely vigilant care from a specialist team of doctors & nurses. Machines do the work of your heart & lungs & circulatory system because your whole body has been overwhelmed by a virus. There were a few patients on ECMO but not many because it's incredibly expensive & labour intensive. When Josie was first brought in, the doctors in ICU debated the wisdom of even bothering to treat her because she was so far gone from the heart attack. Some of the doctors thought she should be left to die; others thought she was pretty hopeless but she should be given the ECMO chance. Thankfully the latter won the day. Some coronavirus patients in the UK are currently on ECMO; it probably costs a million pounds a day per a handful of patients. If you are in the UK, thank you so much for paying you taxes & national health insurance. You saved peoples lives, and you do so every day. Some days they had to treat patients in the corridors in the children's hospital because they'd run out of beds. The RCH in Melbourne is one of the leading children's hospitals in the world; it largely functions because of the amazing charitable donations Victorians give every year. Thank you Victorians. You saved my daughter's life. You pay for her continued cardiac treatment..... One day two doctors and four nurses had to work frantically busily, yet with an eerie calm that only comes with experience & training, to save a teenage boy's life in the ICU corridor. Actually when I say save his life, he may well have died because you don't talk about that stuff in ICU. I did look into his mother's eyes and it's a look you don't want to see. Then again, she probably saw the same look in my eyes, because it was there every day as my daughter struggled between life and death after the virus destroyed a large part of her heart function...
When you die from coronavirus there won't be any family there. You'll die alone and the last faces you see are strange doctors and nurses. You'll be conscious right up to the end, because the virus overwhelms your lungs and heart before your brain dies. You'll be like a sick animal surrounded by other dying bodies; dying bodies with the smell of shit and piss in your nasal passages as they gasp for your last breath. You'll drown on your own phlegm. The doctors and nurses will be so exhausted and overwhelmed they will not even text your family to tell them you have died, because there are so many half-dead corpses and bodies all over the hospital they can't even identify them. Your body will be put on the back of a truck at night and tumbled into a grave in the next town. No-one will mourn at your grave. I found this out by watching the news from Europe this morning. They don't tell you this on the commercial news because it is too upsetting for you.
I am telling you this not shame you or scare you, you will be scared in a week's time. I am telling you this because you can still change.
In Wuhan, China you do your shopping in gloves/mask; come home; leave all clothes/shoes outside your door; spray shopping with disinfectant; unpack shopping;, soap your body and hands thoroughly, shower, put on new clothes. If you are reading this and think it sounds a bit strange, consider where you were 10 days ago.
No comments:
Post a Comment