Delirium Daze: A Covid Journey

By Allen Yates

Is the COVID-19 pandemic now a distant memory and did you wonder what all the fuss was about? This was not the case for Allen Yates. During the height of the UK pandemic he contracted a life-threatening COVID-19 infection which led to 102 days in Wythenshawe Hospital, 68 of them in intensive care and half of that time in an induced coma on a ventilator. Whilst he experienced many bouts of delirium his sister Jackie was the only outside contact with the medical teams. Allen has noted the episodes of delirium he experienced and has coupled them with the detailed diary Jackie kept of Allen’s condition as his life hung in the balance. Allen’s ‘crazy’ and Jackie’s grim reality and the long road to recovery form the basis of this engrossing tale.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Brown Dog Books
• Release date: Sep 20, 2023
• ISBN: 9781839527005

Book preview

Prologue

Cast your minds back to the end of 2019. News was emerging from the city of Wuhan, in China, that a series of severe pneumonia cases had occurred which were reported to be clustered around the wet animal market in the city. It would transpire that these infections had been caused by a virus belonging to a particular class, the coronaviruses, so called because of the crown-like spike proteins located on their surface. Coronaviruses can cause a variety of respiratory, gastrointestinal and neurological diseases. They are not new to science, in fact the common cold is a coronavirus, but strains causing more severe disease have also been reported. There was a Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS) outbreak in 2003, thought to have originated in Guangdong, China, and there was a Middle East Respiratory Syndrome (MERS) outbreak originating in Saudi Arabia in 2012 (https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/wuhan-novel-coronavirus-background-information/wuhan-novel-coronavirus-epidemiology-virology-and-clinical-features, accessed May 2023).

The virus causing this new outbreak in Wuhan spreads faster than the original strain and was found to be a new variant of the SARS CoV virus. It has been designated SARS CoV-2 by the World Health Organization (WHO) and the disease it causes was designated COVID-19 (ref. as previous para). Late November into December 2019 would see the start of a COVID-19 epidemic in Wuhan, one victim of which would be a 25-year-old Welsh man teaching in the city. He is thought to be the first British person to have contracted COVID-19 (https://www.manchestereveningnews.co.uk/news/world-news/first-brit-catch-coronavirus-wuhan-17865294, accessed September 2022). Furthermore, many nationals had gone back to China to celebrate the Chinese New Year and were now returning to their countries of domicile. Within weeks the Wuhan COVID-19 epidemic would become a worldwide pandemic.

By late January 2020 the COVID-19 pandemic had hit the UK. Paradoxically, the first recorded cases on British soil were that of a 23-year-old York University student and his mother, both from Wuhan (https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-55622386, accessed September 2022). In March 2020 it was reported that a man from East Sussex fell ill with COVID-19 symptoms in January 2020 after returning from Austria. Three other members of his family and three friends also had the same symptoms. Then in May 2020 the BBC reported that several members of a Yorkshire choir had suffered COVID-19-like symptoms after one of their partners had returned from a business trip to Wuhan in December 2019. By June 2020 UK COVID-19 cases were being attributed to having originated in Italy, Spain and France, so the pandemic had started in earnest in Europe. Indeed, some scientists believe the SARS CoV-2 virus may have been present in Italy as early as September 2019 (https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=History_of_the_COVID-19_pandemic_in_the_United_Kingdom&oldid=1136847389, pdf downloaded March 2022).

It was not until 23 March (officially the 26 March) that the UK entered the first lockdown. I had retired from my job well before then and, as I live alone, I was isolating quite successfully and only venturing out to do some essential shopping or to get our one hour of prescribed exercise every day. I do recall that very few people were wearing masks in those early days of the pandemic. The area of south Manchester where I live was pretty much like any other of our cities by then; they were all deserted spaces. Be that as it may, as early April came upon us, I began to feel unwell. At that stage I was not suffering the tell-tale signs of this new virus in that my senses of smell and taste were fine, so I wasn’t too worried. However, as we moved into the second week of April that began to change – I had by then developed two of the tell-tale signs of the infection, namely a persistent cough along with a headache, and both were getting progressively worse, a lot worse. What I remember now is that by 12 April, Easter Sunday, I was so worried about how poorly I was feeling that I phoned 999, and within the hour an ambulance had carted me off to Wythenshawe Hospital with the resounding opinion of the attending paramedic ringing in my ears – ‘You’ve got it mate.’ By then the virus had taken a fierce hold of me and that, in fact, was not my perception of how I entered Wythenshawe Hospital at the time, as you shall see below. What I didn’t know then was that I would spend the next 102 days in hospital, 68 of them in intensive care with almost half of that time intubated, proned and on a ventilator.

That reality, however, is only part of this tale. I had spent almost 40 years as an NHS scientist so I was no stranger to hospitals or disease. Even so, I was in no way prepared for the unbelievable effects the virus, and subsequently the mind-blowing range of tranquilisers, sedatives, opioids, painkillers and antipsychotics they gave me to combat the disease would have on my brain (Alfentanil, Midazolam, Quetiapine, Propofol, Pregabalin and Morphine to name a few. NB, there is a glossary of medical terms at the rear of the book). For me the next few months would be a complete fairy story of wild adventures happening in my mind whilst my body lay completely bed-bound. At the same time my wonderful sister, Jackie, would have to experience the daily turmoil of the reality of my situation as she fielded phone calls from the hospital about my progress or decline. She then had to disseminate those messages to all my family and friends. To my eternal gratitude she kept a detailed diary of her communication with the medical teams and I am so thankful to her for the time and effort she put in, not to mention the anguish she must have gone through being the conduit of information for everyone else. I thank her for having my corner all through that period and far beyond.

As a scientist, having an observational nature meant that those episodes of ‘crazy’ I could remember were hastily noted on my mobile phone when I was moved to the step-down ward and had started to recover from the worst of the infection and the powerful effects of the various drugs I had been given. There were many more that passed my memory by. When I left the ICU after 68 days, I was transferred to the North West Ventilation Unit where I gradually drifted back to reality and was faced with the prospect of life-changing effects on my health; more of that later. What I can attest to is that the episodes of fantasy I experienced have not been fabricated post-illness to spice things up a bit. To me these bouts of delirium were as real as the words on this page, which to my mind made the experience all the more staggering.

What follows here in Part 1 of our tale is the juxtaposed relating of my sister’s reality (the J(ackie) chapters), which outline the nuts and bolts of what was actually happening to me, related by the medical staff in daily phone calls to my sister who duly noted these developments in the detailed diary she kept, compared to my ‘warts and all’ fantasy (the A(llen) chapters) of what I thought happened to me in ICU as a consequence of my infection and the drugs the medics were giving me to keep me alive. Following that section are our joint recollections of the subsequent month I spent on the North West Ventilation Unit trying to pick up the pieces (Part 2), my ten-week convalescence at Jackie and Martin’s house (Part 3) and my subsequent return home and the efforts that have been made since then to improve my situation (Part 4). Please bear in mind the J and A chapters follow their own individual chronology, for example J5 may not tally with A5. This is not surprising when you consider the addled state my mind was in when I was making note of my wanderings. These chapters may make you laugh at the crazy, they may even make you cry; I hope they do both. All in all, I think it makes for interesting reading; please judge for yourselves.

Allen Yates

Manchester

March 2023

Part One

Critical – Jackie vs Allen

J1. Onset (05/04/20 – 13/04/20)

Day –6 (6 days before admission to hospital). Had a video call with Allen, who was feeling a bit fed up. Currently, he is only going out for short walks and shopping for essentials. He also complained of a headache that has now lasted for a few days.

Day –5. Allen has now started with a temperature and has decided to self-isolate.

Day –2. Allen spoke to his brother Chris and told him he is not feeling great; he