“Breathe!” is a simple instruction, one which you can’t imagine will ever be impossible to follow. But I was admitted to hospital with Covid and pneumonia in January this year and, a couple of days later, it became impossible to breathe. I’d never before hit the emergency button in a hospital, but it had immediate effect.
Suddenly there were more doctors and nurses round my bed than my brain could compute. “I can’t breathe!” I strained. I couldn’t fill my lungs, only take tiny shallow gasps.
I was rushed to the ICU. I’m glad I couldn’t see the equipment behind me, the blinking machinery, digital graphs and tubing – wide and thick, concertina-ed, thin and blue – all the way up to the ceiling. I simply felt I was in a place of safety.
I recently realised that, when I think back to the confines of my hospital bed, I consider it as a crib. You’re coddled in the ICU, with 24-hour one-on-one nursing care. Someone hears you breathe night and day.
You try, during the nurses’ shift handover, to listen to what they are saying, alert for any whispers that might make you panic, but I usually gave up. For three and a half weeks, my lungs were in bad shape: scarred, damaged, with layers that looked like broken glass. The smallest of the masks you’re asked to wear doesn’t just supply oxygen, it pushes your lungs open.
I felt weighed down by it, as if I was climbing an almost vertical hill. There was a Saturday, three weeks in, when I didn’t care whether I l.