*** INTRO ***

The conversation about the COVID-19 pandemic keeps coming back to ventilators.

"Do we have enough ventilators?"

"We need to flatten the curve so we don't run out of ventilators."

"Ventilators can save lives, but it's far better not to get sick in the first place."

I wanted to tell my story about being on a ventilator to add some perspective in this important conversation.

A/N - I am not a doctor, so I don't know if all the details are accurate, but this story is my experience as best I remember.

A/N No. 2 - Actually, I was heavily sedated for the middle third of this story, so my memory is probably pretty fuzzy. Let's assume that part is a poem.

*** I WANNA BE SEDATED ***

Three years ago, I came down with antibiotic-resistant pneumonia. I have a genetic lung disease and get regular pneumonia more often than most people. This story starts when I had regular pneumonia. I was on two strong antibiotics when I suddenly got much sicker.

I then spent two days at my local hospital and when a change of antibiotics didn't help, I was transferred to a larger, regional hospital. By this time, I was having an extremely hard time breathing, even with a lot of extra oxygen (6 or 8 liters per minute, I believe). I was working so hard to move air in and out of my lungs that the effort was making me out of breath.

After being examined by several doctors at the regional hospital, my new favorite doctor said, "We would like to sedate you and put you on a ventilator. Would that be alright?"

I didn't really know what being on a ventilator was like. I didn't listen much beyond, "Sedate." I felt like I had been slowly suffocating for two days and was ready for anything that might help. If the doctor had said, "We think hitting you on the back of the head with this medical-grade two-by-four could reset the breathing center of your brain," I would have said, "I'll hold my hair."

I already had an IV in my arm, so after a few minutes of gathering supplies and staff, the doctor attached a syringe to my IV, pressed the plunger, and before I could count to 10 the world faded to black.

*** THE MONKS KEEP ME COMPANY ***

I didn't wake up, exactly, but I wasn't asleep anymore, either. It was kind of like dreaming a really boring dream.

Things didn't feel quite solid. There were people around me, but they kept changing faces. I was lying in a bed in a small room with yellow (orange-plaid-polka-dot) curtains that could be pulled across the door.

There was a kind of droning sound, like Tibetan monks chanting in the next room, or maybe inside my skull.

And I still felt like I was suffocating.

*** THE NITTY-GRITTY ***

As I stabilized, my sedation was turned down. Or maybe I acclimated to it a bit. I had long stretches of unpleasant awareness.

A tube about the width of my thumb ran into my mouth and down my throat. It was quite bendy, but it still pressed against my soft palate at the back of my throat. If I turned my head I would gag and throw up.

I had two or three IV's in my arms. My chest was covered in stickers attached to wires to monitor my heart. I had a catheter because I couldn't get out of bed to pee. I had an oxygen monitor taped to my toe. A blood pressure cuff was around my arm and went off automatically every four hours, night and day. Not that there were any windows or any other way to tell night from day.

I was sedated enough that I couldn't maneuver myself in bed. Nurses came and repositioned me every few hours, tilting me to the right, then the left, so I wouldn't get bedsores. They put pillows under my heels and elbows.

Even though I had pneumonia, I couldn't cough, so a nurse put a small tube through the tube in my throat and suctioned my lungs with a device like the suction tool at the dentist. Those were my least favorite moments of my entire hospital stay.

As though I didn't have enough going on, I was on my period that week. I didn't have anything on beneath my hospital gown. The nurses put a thin, absorbent pad about eighteen inches square, like a puppy training pad, beneath me, and gave me a quick wash once or twice a day.

A nurse, or possibly a nurse's aid, brushed my teeth for me with an extra-large q-tip sort of thing, soaked with a kind of cleansing liquid that didn't need to be spit out. I didn't mind this as my mouth was very dry.

I couldn't speak, eat, drink, hold a book, or watch TV. I couldn't listen to music because it gave me frightening hallucinations. I tried typing on my phone to communicate with the people in the room but I couldn't type with any accuracy. All I could do was lie in bed at the mercy of the medical system.

Eventually the doctors decided that I needed a rest and turned my sedation back up.

*** EXTUBATED ***

I woke up to find several people gathered around my bed. I barely had time to get my bearings before someone was telling me to take a deep breath and blow.

As I blew as hard as my weakened lungs could, the doctor (nurse? respiratory therapist?) pulled about twelve inches of nasty, wet tubing from my throat. I had recovered enough to be extubated.

It felt wonderful to have the tube out of my mouth and throat. Closing my mouth properly for the first time in days was bliss.

Someone asked me how I was feeling. I tried to reply, but my vocal cords had stretched out and I couldn't make a sound. It would be another three days before I could speak again.

Without the ventilator to help me breathe, I needed an oxygen mask. I needed too much oxygen to use the tube with the little prongs that sit underneath your nose.

I was physically weak and couldn't sit up or get out of bed. All my energy and all my focus went towards breathing. I don't think I slept much, either. Every breath was a balancing act: too small and the suffocating feeling came back, too big and I wouldn't be able to exhale all the way before needing the next breath. It was frustrating and exhausting. And I couldn't even cry because that made it harder to breathe.

Slowly, over the next two days, breathing became less difficult. I could listen to music on my headphones, which made the time go by much more quickly. The tubes and wires were slowly disconnected from my body. I got to pee in a commode chair beside the bed. I had lost so much strength that I needed two nurses to help me get out of bed. Once I could stand with the help of only one nurse, I was moved out of the ICU and into a regular hospital room. I had spent six days in the intensive care unit and would spend another four weeks in hospital before I got to go home.

*** THE AFTERMATH ***

It took months before I felt like myself again. When I finally got home from the hospital, we had to put my mattress on the living room floor for a while because I couldn't make it up the stairs to my bedroom. I was essentially a guest in my own house, with my family doing all the cooking and cleaning for me for weeks.

I later learned that people who are bed-bound in the ICU lose an average of 1% of their muscle mass every day. As someone who doesn't gain weight easily, it was an up-hill climb to get my strength back.

I permanently lost about 5% of my lung function. For a healthy person, this probably wouldn't be a big deal, but since my lung function was already low before I got sick, I have had to make permanent changes in how I treat my condition.

So, how bad was it, really? Well, there's a part in the first Deadpool movie where the main character is put into an airtight chamber and tortured by reducing the amount of oxygen until he was on the verge of passing out. Getting sick enough to be on a ventilator felt like that.

As for my time on the ventilator, I found that it was up there with natural childbirth. Being on a ventilator wasn't painful, but childbirth is generally over much more quickly, and I recovered faster from having a baby than I did from being in the ICU. With both there was a similar feeling of your body being taken over by something beyond your control, of having to ride out something that you couldn't steer. I didn't know how bad it would get or how long it would last. And with both childbirth and my time on a ventilator, it was something I had to go through to see my kids. (I did not let my kids visit while I was in the ICU, but did once I was in a regular hospital room.)

I have been asked if I suffered from any PTSD-like symptoms after the experience. I don't think I do, though I do occasionally get a, "No, thank you," feeling when I smell new plastic.

I am so grateful that the ventilator was there when I needed it. I could easily have died without one. The experience was worth it to go home to my family.

Having been so seriously ill, and being more prone to respiratory illnesses all my life, I am being extra-careful during this pandemic. Being on a ventilator was worth it, but it's something I really want to avoid, especially if I can do so by something as simple as standing 2 meters away from other people. I'm staying home unless I absolutely must go out, and everyone in my house is strict with their precautions, too, and will be for the next year, most likely.

Most of you reading this are low-risk for the Coronavirus. Most of you, if you get infected, won't get sick at all, or will get better without having to go to the hospital. And going to the hospital doesn't mean you will automatically go on a ventilator. There are non-invasive ways to help people who are less sick than I was, like oxygen under the nose, or masks that help you breathe by adjusting the air pressure for each breath.

But most of you know someone who is at high risk of getting very sick. These are the people we wash our hands for, and wear masks for, and all the other things we are doing to slow the spread of this virus.

To all of you who are taking precautions even though you are low-risk, from the bottom of my heart, thank you. I really appreciate it, and so to the countless thousands of other vulnerable people out there.

Quite literally, it means everything to us.