Hope Drains Away part 2

Since I returned from SA in October 2019, I found that I was not fully recovered.  I was finding it hard to plan anything. I was having days of low blood pressure and my oxygen saturation was not stable.  I was having blackouts in the shower and some days I felt very poorly from the moment I started my day. The days began to blur into a haze and my thoughts started to switch to death. I was disappearing into a pit of dispair.

A succession of leaking urinary sheaths (a condom like device used to capture urine) resulted in a wound in my groin. While this is not a problem a normal person would struggle with, in my situation it's a serious problem. The wound has become a more persistent injury and now is a part of my regular routine and is a constant source of pain.

Lockdown - a word we never used - has now become part of our daily vocabulary. Along with the word came something new, a quieter world and new fears.

I began to realise that I could be victim of this unscrupulous enemy. The contagious nature of this pest seemed to enhance the sense of fear around me. I thought that I should make arrangements for the possibility that I may lose the ability to keep control of my affairs. I have been a very private person with a massive backpack of guilt for all the pain I put my family through. I did some terrible things during a time after my accident; I didn't realise how distorted my world view had become.

So I wrote a letter to Colleen and the children and set out my access to my affairs. After giving a link to this file on the familty WhatsApp I could relax and focus on getting better.

Lockdown week 5 and government insistence that they were following scientific advice and that they were doing their best begins to unravel with news of their incompetent choices. The stuttering start to the lockdown, the hesitant start due to the lure of a simple herd immunity plan with larger loss of life vs the WHO recommended approach of lockdown and "test, test, test". Eventually settling for lockdown without proper testing and tracking. The country hurtled along the Covid disease curve while the hospital death toll climbing into 20 000 range. At this point news of the serious deaths in the care sector exposed the deep running neglect of the care sector and the prejudice against the hard done by people who worked in it.

The testing system has improved and the care system is finally getting tested and also some PPE but now it's a race to setup a track and trace system. This is an obvious failure of planning. Even a basic knowledge of critical path scheduling would know to start recruiting and training the people you need to do the track and trace at the same time as you ramp up the testing program. It seems that our leaders cannot think ahead; so now that the test capacity is up we have started to build a track and trace function.

I could continue to list the mistakes and obviously incompetent decisions of this government who have been beguiled by pseudo intellectual Dominic Cummings; but it is boring and truly hopeless.

Hope has drained away but I have been getting stronger and a brief spell of warm weather has been a ray of hope - maybe I will survive the virus, maybe I will have a tomorrow.

Hope drains away

It's 2020 and lockdown has been our way of life for so many weeks. However, my way of life hasn't changed; I have effectively been locked down for 4 years. Ib have not been able to leave my house for this period except for a a disastrous trip to SA, more about this later. Virtually, not understood fully by those around me I was struggling with depression and a feeling of hopelessness that death was eminent or incredibly close.

I am paralysed from the neck down. In 2016, a long term urinary tract infection started to move around my body. First signs were swelling. Puffy legs, ankles and skin. It was not long before this nasty infection (pseudomonas) started to fill my lungs with fluid. Then one morning I couldn't wake up.

This kicked off a period of instability with my health improving and dropping causing 3 separate stays in ICU. My final stay in ICU lasted for months and as I had weakened so much during this period; I was in no position to argue against the decision to operate and put a tracheotomy into my throat. I finally left ICU with a new care package and a ventilator for overnight use. Life became more difficult and monochrome. I didn't realise it but hope was leaking away and I found myself in a place where I couldn't think beyond surviving each day.

My isolation increased and I found speech became increasingly difficult  I started getting low blood pressure durring the day, as low as 54/49. The biggest low came in September 2019 when I decided to have a trip to SA to see my parents and for my kids to join me for the visit. I picked up an infection on the flight, that nearly ended it. I spent the whole time just barely awake. I used all my tools to keep my chest clear and my exhausted carers were called upon to do the work I needed to keep me out of hospital (I was sure that I wouldn't survive in that case) so between my carers and the local GP we managed to clear it up to allow me to fly home a week after my scheduled date.

to  be continued ...