Patient Zero

August 2009 saw the UK, the World in the midst of H1N1 pandemic.  There was mass hysteria.  The news was full of it.  You opened a paper, turned on the TV, the radio, read an online news article,  Swine Flu was going to kill us all! If not everyone, then most definitely those with underlying health problems.

People who had it were to told stay at home.  Stay away from doctors’ surgeries and hospitals.  Dedicated phone lines were set up to diagnose and treat. At this point there was no readily available vaccine.  Tamiflu was being used to treat the symptoms.  But even then it wasn’t looking good for people with underlying health problems.

At the start of August 2009 I started coughing and spluttering.  When I lay back I started to cough.  I put it down to a fluid cough caused by my heart condition.   I held back on my fluid intake.   I coughed and spluttered for another day and at one point the Ward Sister came up to me and said that just as a precaution they wanted to swab me for swine flu.  We laughed it off.  How could I have Swine flu? I’d not left the building in almost 4 months.  No one I knew had it and no other patients had similar symptoms.

The tests came back positive. 

It was all change from there.  I was initially moved to a side room.  No one was allowed in or out of the room without being gowned up.  It was like a scene from the film Outbreak.  The gowns they had to wear were like full on Hazmat suits! There were double masks and visors to wear over the masks.

The next day I was moved from the side room to a completely different ward.  I was moved to a negative pressure room.  One of those rooms that had an antechamber where the staff got hazmatted up before coming in and poking and prodding.  I didn’t know any of the staff on this ward.  Didn’t know their names, their faces, only occasionally did  I recognise a muffled voice through a mask.

This was it.  This was my lowest point.  I’d seen the news. I was paralysed, diabetic, overweight and had a heart that pumped at 15%.  I wasn’t making it to rehab.  I wasn’t making it out of this room.