John Hill’s Story
My name is John Hill, I was diagnosed with ABPA around 5 or 6 years ago and have been in declining health with it for some time. As a result, I shielded for much of 2020, and was fairly high on the list for my vaccines, getting my second one back in April.
I have to confess that I probably felt that I was ‘OK’ & that at worst I’d maybe get a bad cold, but (& I don’t wish to alarm anyone of course) but here is my tale. Somewhere around mid-October, I lost my game of hide & seek & Ol’ Corony caught up with me.
I started to feel a little unwell around the weekend of the 23/4th, but as I’d been near someone who seemed to have a cold, I wasn’t too worried as I typically have a very good record for not being bothered by man flu.
On Monday the 25th though, I felt as though I’d been hit with a sledgehammer. I couldn’t get out of bed that morning, & more or less slept the entire day. Similarly, the next day. I made some efforts through the week to ‘get going’ but continued to feel extraordinarily unwell. Of very deep concern to my family was my Saturday afternoon choice to stay in bed rather than head off to see my beloved Huddersfield Town take on Millwall.
By Monday, I finally was able to drag myself out & to the GP as I’d concluded this didn’t seem to be going away. The GP I saw, someone I’d never met before, diagnosed a post-viral problem & advised going home & sleeping it off. However by now I was vomiting, had lost over a stone, and was becoming unable to speak. My wife took me back on Tuesday. A particularly upsetting day as the tickets I had for a trip to Peterborough United remain unopened in the envelope. My regular GP saw me & was alarmed enough to send me up to hospital where I spent the first 24 hours on drips, steroids & I don’t even know what else.
My big shock came though when a nurse appeared in my room & asked if I knew that I’d tested positive for covid. About an hour later, another one appeared & said that I was to be transferred to the specialist covid respiratory ward in Halifax “as a precaution”. In a nutshell, I spent a long time on nebulisers, was given steroids and antibiotics intravenously, but managed to keep off oxygen, which the doctors seemed very impressed about!
I’ve been left with double pneumonia which I’m told to think weeks in terms of recovery time & will need scans to assess for any other lung damage, but initial signs seem positive.
One thing though that has stuck with me out of it. I have never, ever felt so desperately unwell in my life as I did around the time of my admission. And one of the doctors picked up on this…he basically said that with my history & seeing how ill I had become, without the vaccine “you wouldn’t have stood a chance”.
A couple of further observations:
The NHS is staffed by utterly, truly amazing people. Not just the medics who we can assume have a level of understanding of the science of moving around a covid ward, but the people who come to change your bed, bring you food and drink, check you are ok, clean around you. As well as dealing with some of my room-mates who were, shall we say, a little on the challenging side!
Track and Trace. I could write an entirely separate blog about this. What a stunning waste of money it is. Some highlights include:
Being told that I can’t have become ill on the day I said I did because the system would only allow the day after.
Being sent the same form to complete 6 times, and still getting emails warning me about my failure to respond.
A caller not disconnecting a call correctly, so we were then treated to a 5-minute voicemail of his next call.
Being rung at 8am when I’m trying to rest (as was my wife, Kate, who also tested positive, albeit with more manageable but not non-existent symptoms).
As my GP said to me, it is depressing to think of the kinds of clinical support that could have been paid for when instead they have just set up a useless and ineffective call centre who are hounding sick people whilst the people who are spreading the virus probably don’t even know they have it.
Perhaps my one amusing story from the whole episode was listening to Kate completely lose her temper this morning with the latest numpty to call, which went something along the lines of:
T&T: “Madam, I’m sorry but you do realise this call is being recorded.”
Kate: “Good, I hope so because you need some training. Goodbye.”
11 November 2021
