OP 💐💐 for you and your mum. She will need a shoulder to cry on and support to recover.
I was in hospital for 9 nights - some of those on CPAP. If you want to understand what your mum might have experienced and witnessed, my thread might help you. Towards the end, you will read about equipment being stolen from patients by HCWs looking after other patients. This is because equipment was failing to work and the units available were insufficient for the demand. By the time I left last Saturday, there was virtually no equipment that worked. The HCWs were reliant on my own oxymeter to monitor my pulse and oxygen levels.
www.mumsnet.com/Talk/coronavirus/4110276-I-m-on-CPAP-please-help-me-survive-hell
Hundreds of kind Mumsnetters reached out and took me into their arms in my darkest times. They literally helped the HCWs to save my life.
I want to return to the thread to complete my story as I feel those wonderful women (and perhaps some men) deserve to know how things have worked out for me. But I’m so uptight reading thread after thread on here where people are minimising the risk posed by COVID, and othering those who have “underlying conditions”. My underlying condition was slightly damaged lungs following radiotherapy for breast cancer. My body flooded my lungs to protect them from the COVID attack.
Two women who were in my ward died. They were elderly and it is clear that many people on these threads see them as disposable - which I condemn completely. But people would be wrong to assume that everyone at risk is elderly. A slim woman in her 40s was sent to ICU and two others were in their early 30s at the very most. My own exceedingly fit mid 50s husband was in agony for over a week as the COVID attacked his bones.
I apologise if this reads to anyone as all about me. It really, really is not. People are going to start dying in huge numbers very soon. I want people to understand that this is now unavoidable. I wish with all my heart that we had acted sooner to prevent this.
Please keep COVID away from your door. Keep yourselves and your loved ones safe. Follow the rules. Protect the NHS, which is on its knees.
And help all those people who are unable to stay home because of the work that they do. In helping keep yourselves safe, you will be helping everyone.