Four survivors share their stories about what it is like to end up in hospital with coronavirus. Read more on Grazia.
Malin Dahlman was alone in her east London flat when she started struggling for breath. The otherwise healthy 32-year-old could barely speak by the time she called for an ambulance. As she waited for it to arrive, she FaceTimed a friend. ‘I just lay there so my friend could see if I was breathing,’ she says. ‘I wasIt was mid-March and she was rushed straight to the nearby Royal London Hospital; staff quickly cleared the corridors to make room for a Covid-19 patient.
, from hospital porters and cleaners upwards, have made extraordinary sacrifices and often put their lives on the line as Britain battled this unprecedented virus. The sense of gratitude has been palpable: for 10 weeks, we came out to clap in the streets for the NHS and key workers. ‘They saved my life,’ says Ria Lakhani, 35, a sales executive from London, who was in intensive care at UCLH for seven days in early April.
how she would say goodbye to her family. ‘Breathing is something we do without thinking and suddenly it became the hardest thing,’ she says. ‘I owe my life to those doctors and nurses. It’s a virus they didn’t know anything about and yet they would sit by my bed, risking their life for me. I’ve been recovering at home for weeks now and I still think about them every day.’have paid a heavy price. More than 200 NHS hospital staff have died, others have suffered serious illness.
But, she explains, as a nurse, you don’t think about catching viruses. ‘You think about your patients first. I look at them and think, “That could be my child or my mother,”’ she says. ‘I wouldn’t say I’m never afraid, but nursing is part of who I am. I don’t want the patient to feel they’re being treated differently because of Covid, I want them to feel they’re being treated like an individual and that’s exactly how I was made to feel when I was looked after.
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