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Welp ... I just had my first direct descriptions of what COVID-19 is like. Three examples, actually. I'll write about the second and third on Thursday.
@DerAchsenZeit @saltaf01 @JimmyLevendia @Le_Gaul @christopherburd @hogtownserb @VarangianSkull @Iulian68 @suvyboy @MuskieRA
@DerAchsenZeit @saltaf01 @JimmyLevendia @Le_Gaul @christopherburd @hogtownserb @VarangianSkull @Iulian68 @suvyboy @MuskieRA
A week ago, one of my friends from university days heard his wife talking to someone at 11 PM after she had gone to bed. She kept talking for 15 minutes, at which time he went to check up on her. She was delirious.
She'd been fine when she'd gone to bed two hours earlier but then started talking 'in her sleep'. My friend woke her, and she was shocked when he did so since he had just woken her from a vivid dream. She was short of breath.
My friend, nerd that he is (like yours truly, an engineer), had a blood-oxygen saturation gizmo at hand. He clipped it on one of her fingers. Oxygen saturation ... THIRTY-NINE PERCENT! Impossible ... she'd be dead.
Try another finger ... FOURTY PERCENT! Also impossible ... the brain malfunctions below 70% (and so, delirium) but it dies at such a low oxygen concentration, for lack of oxygen.
Emergency! Call an ambulance. It arrives. ... Do you or anyone here have coronavirus or have symptoms, Sir? No ... nothing until I found my wife like this.
My gizmo says that her blood saturation is 40%. Impossible, Sir. She'd be dead.
My gizmo says that her blood saturation is 40%. Impossible, Sir. She'd be dead.
The ambulance man measures it with his own device ... 55%. Impossible. On another finger ... 60%.
All right Sir, we're taking her to hospital NOW.
All right Sir, we're taking her to hospital NOW.
The crew deploys very bright spotlights that illuminate his house from outdoors. It's 03 AM, it looks almost like a military operation. The ambulance men put on heavy isolation suits, go in to the house, and bring her in. We're bringing her to the LaSalle Borough hospital, Sir.
Another half hour: the ambulance crew calls back ... We're taking her to the Jewish General Hospital, Sir. ... That's where THE worst cases are sent, where Montreal's expert doctors in this matter are concentrated.
She gets sent to Intensive Care, immediately. She gets intubated and put into artificial coma. A week later (and two days ago) they woke her.
She's alive, though she can barely speak and sounds like someone's scrubbed her vocal cords with sandpaper. She said that she feels like a truck has driven over her.
God bless, let's hope she survives.
God bless, let's hope she survives.
END OF STORY (for now).
