A Waking Nightmare for COVID-19 Patients

I remember very clearly a nurse speaking very loudly wanting me to kind of understand Josh you came to the emergency room you are in the ICU he tested positive for Kovac you have a breathing tube in you need to relax and breathe or you are going to die I was like having these hallucinations where I would like be passing out and really slowly be falling at a super slow rate I remember having thoughts like oh I'm dying and this is gonna hurt when I hit my face on the ground I thought one of the nurses had taken a circular saw and just buzzed my arm off and then just buzzed off both of my legs another circular saw came through the wall and just cut my head in half I was positive they were trying to kill me my oxygen levels dropped my lungs were filled with fluid I had a RT s acute respiratory distress syndrome they gave me the Kovac 19 coronavirus test came back positive and I was told I would have to be put on a ventilator as they were getting me ready I was just praying the Hail Mary over and over again I was just thinking about my two-year-old Sonic I want to see him graduate college I want to see him maybe get married or have kids I want to seem grow up I don't want to die they didn't give my wife much over at all about the second day in I was ready to write a note to the nurses to just kind of take me off life support I had a lot of confusion going on wasn't sure I had gotten to where I was I had actually developed ICU deliria [Music] we used to think we're doing these patients a favor by keeping them completely sedated and in a medically induced coma so that they wouldn't have any memory of this difficult time but that kind of backfired because unfortunately they often do have memories but their false memories they took real-life stimulus and turn them into something really really scary the hallucinations were just unbelievable it's so real they're not nightmares they're memories even when you sedated it's not what you're asleep there is a level of consciousness the muted sort of restful peaceful look that some folks can mistaken for their resting their sleeping when in fact their brain is on fire their brain globally what's happening the cells aren't working right they're not getting enough oxygen or blood pressure or food for example and those cells start to go awry so you can imagine you get critically ill you didn't plan it so you just wake up in a medication induced haze you've got a tube down your throat your wrists may be tied there's nobody around you that you know under any other conditions that would be considered torture these two women hold my arms down Malaysia shoved a tube up my nose was extremely traumatic I still have such vivid memories of that I couldn't move my arms very well until that started happening to me and then I was flailing patients would have these vivid nightmare like experiences of people torturing them and kidnapping them they saw blood dripping down the walls and seeing people with animal heads walking around or children were floating by no faces we'd a young patient and he thought the nurses were restraining his arms and attaching snakes to his arms and that would then drawing blood from him we've had patients who are taken from the unit to get an MRI there convinced that they're being moved into an oven they may have a catheter that is removed they're very convinced under the influence of delirium that someone has tried to sexually assault them that delusional memory is quite traumatizing even when the patients recover and they know that these things didn't happen the terror is still so real I go home and nobody said anything to me about the hallucinations that I would have once I was draw from all those drugs this doesn't end when you walk out the door at the hospital our patients often say when they follow up with us I was in the ICU I don't think anything happened to my brain it was a problem with my lungs I think I'm going crazy ICU was of course extremely difficult but the delirium was was the hardest when he had came home that day you know when I first got to actually talk to him after eight days it was just like this huge relief like oh we made it everything's gonna be fine I wasn't thinking oh he's gonna have delirium that night I walked in the bathroom and he was just sitting in there and he was like he was counting on his fingers and he I kept asking like orienting questions like where are you like what state are we in right and he couldn't answer any of them I was talking to his home health nurse I was like do we need to get on an anti-psychotic the ER doctor called and said he's fine this is delirium I was having constant breakdowns meltdowns anxiety attacks so there's absolutely no mental health follow-up at all [Music] this frequency may be close to somebody that actually was in combat or somebody that was sexually assaulted so it's incredibly common the first day out sweating and stuff and I went into a pennant attack it's like this I'm in a room by myself you know everything started fall coming down on me at once after I got out of the hospital I began to experience major depression and post-traumatic stress symptoms and they surprised me so much because I thought I was through it and then I just kept having all these nightmares where I was like fighting to wake up fighting the wake up fighting to wake up I just reached the point where I wished I had died if you have somebody who gets out of the hospital from COBIT all communities need to have their mental health people ready to rock and roll they're gonna be pushed home with no support and because their loved ones didn't watch them go through this they don't know emotionally you're by yourself I was alone for four weeks five weeks six weeks without my kids without my support system you're in your head you're almost dying how do you get over that and get back out into the world and act like nothing happened if you had to design an experiment to make delirium as bad as it could be kovat is it your you not only you have more drugs a longer illness but now you have absence of family and absence of mobility which are two of the main things that reduce delirium so we really have a worry that we're going to have this massive public health problem kovat is essentially a delirium factory delirium seems to be one of the biggest risk factors for future long-term issues half of the folks end up being unemployed if they were working previously and many of their lives end up getting upended folks get divorced they have the inability to run their finances and that's pretty devastating we're gonna have such an unprecedented cohort of ICU survivors surviving and getting our life back for two different things we have kind of this perception that people are sick and then they bounce back but that's not the way it is dull it's you this chapter of your life happens and it changes every chapter after that being a kovat survivor is this year our beacon of hope right now I see those lines of people leaving hospitals and the staff is applauding when kovat isn't in the news every day and people aren't applauding the coded survivors I think you're going to see people who live really really difficult painful lives as survivors if they don't get the help they need to navigate a path ahead [Music]

Channel: The Atlantic

Views: 947,185

Keywords: atlantic, the atlantic, icu delirium, icu delirium stories, icu delirium patient experience, icu delirium video, icu covid 19 recovery, ventilator icu recovery, covid 19 patient, covid 19 patient footage, covid 19 news, covid 19 documentary, covid 19 icu hospital, covid 19 icu recovery stories, intensive care unit, coronavirus, coronavirus patients, ptsd, mental health, sedatives, ptsd from hospital, hospital documentary, coronavirus documentary

Id: 8_AKe07J7tE

Length: 9min 46sec (586 seconds)

Published: Fri May 08 2020