Sunlight slanted in from the open window and the road down below looked busier than ever. It was just 10.30 am, but I was already lost to the world, absorbed in the news headlines I was swiping through on the iPhone screen with the stiff British voice of IOS Daniel reading them along. I wasn’t even too aware of the sweat streaming down my face and neck.
“One-day coronavirus case count jump above 1000 in Chennai”, the text-to-speech engine read. The strapline noted with equal alarm that the death counts were also on the rise. I double tapped on the headline with my finger to open the story and read it, thinking how covid-19 had ceased to be a mere statistic, but a deadly disease that forced me into the isolation ward. The virus wasn’t so much outside anymore. It was swimming in my bloodstream and cheerfully chewing away pieces of my lung. The thought almost made me drop the iPhone on the tiled floor.
“Get ready sir, we’re going to another room,” said a nurse as she grabbed my elbow with her gloved fingers and pressed the steely edge of a syringe to my arm. I gulped the air, allowed a minute for the painful prick to end and told her I’ll be ready in a minute.
She ushered me into a much larger room with the cold hiss of the air-conditioner, guiding me towards the corner bed.
“Hey…have you come to see me?” I was surprised by the voice coming from across the room and realized a second later that it was uncle.
Since uncle was hard of hearing, I merely shook my head and mouthed the words, “I’m admitted here…like you” pointing a finger at him. I wasn’t sure about the protocol and didn’t take the risk of getting close to him.
In his hay days My uncle, Dr Sethuraman, was a top-ranked district health official who worked for the government’s tuberculosis programme. Even in the ripe-old age of 84, he was easygoing with the nurses and other hospital staff. In a matter of minutes, he narrated my backstory to nurses who busied themselves with unfinished tasks for the morning.
Uncle’s only shortcoming was his difficulties in hearing. “Soon as he gets out of the hospital, we should get him a hearing aid,” my brother was telling us. I agreed since I knew how isolated and aloof uncle might feel without participating in dinner-time conversations and without the audio on the television serials, which he watched sometimes.
“He’s amazing,” the voice of the chief doctor turned my focus to the more serious things like pills and treatments.
“We had to put him on ventilator when he came in here three days ago and never thought he’d recover so quickly. Now, he’s fine even without high-flow nasal cannula,” the doctor said, picking up my file.
He handed me a spirometer and asked me to blow. I held the hookah like mouthpiece and blew as if my life depended on it.
“that’s excellent,” the doctor exclaimed, telling me how the hard blow or sharp inhalation (holding the device upside-down) would make the three balls inside its cagy shell jump up or come down.
“Keep blowing this at least four to five times a day. This’d improve your lung strength and help us understand how your respiratory system functions,” the doctor said, passing on instructions to the nurse about the dosage of medicines and frequency.
That gave something for me to work on for the next couple of days. After two or three hours, when I found nothing else to do, I had picked up the spirometer and blew into the mouthpiece. “You’re doing much better than other patients,” a nurse informed me, observing the way I made all the three disc-like balls jump up and come down.
I seemed to have discovered the best way to counter the anxieties about covid-19: busying myself with blowing the spirometer, checking Google News on the phone, writing the emailer for my next webinar or watching movies I enjoyed as a kid in the eighties. I played music that spurred me on to work and even did a little wriggle of the hips, about the only dance move I could manage. I never cared about other people and now I didn’t as I learnt to distance myself in a spiritual and emotional sense.
My sister, brothers and other relatives called one after the other. So were my friends and office colleagues. Mobile phone may not be the perfect replacement for physical proximity, but it was enough to make me understand that people cared.
Across the empty room, uncle and I exchanged a few half-gestured and half-spoken words. When I needed to locate the bathroom entrance, uncle would promptly sit up and let me know if I was a few steps back or forward.
The large room with emergency equipments got filled up in a matter of hours with four more patients. Uncle and I didn’t have the luxury of conversing across the empty space. A 38-year-old patient on a ventilator was brought in and I could hear him telling the doctor that he couldn’t breathe. “You’ll be ok when the ventilator kicks in a few minutes,” the doctor said.
The next morning, I woke up to a busy room with patients in all corners. Ventilators beeped in all directions and the nurses went back and forth between each patient. Most, of course, came with breathing difficulties. I closed my eyes and felt if I were about to have shortage of breath and have ventilators installed in no time.
I went about with my spirometer routine with movie-watching and writing, determined not to allow the anxiety and panic to overwhelm me. Being close to the patients in worse condition than I was didn’t comfort me in any way. So, on day-2 of my hospital stay, as the doctor declared that I could be shifted back to a single room again, I enthusiastically agreed.
By the same evening, a nurse held the end of my white stick and guided me to room 209, my home-to-be for the next few days. The one good thing about this room was its wide bathroom with a bucket and a mug. My cousin Narasimhan, who patiently listened to my grumblings about my anxieties of being in a covid hospital every time he called, arranged for fresh clothes to be delivered to my room so that I could clean up and change.
Being away from the patients struggling to breathe should’ve brought some comfort, but the solitary room with just the lazily spinning ceiling fan and the window open to the free world was little comfort. The constant sound of someone coughing, the beep-beep of ventilator and the wail of the ambulance that brought new patients broke my fragile confidence and attempts to divert my focus into writing or watching old movies.
It was then I realized that I didn’t want to be away from the patients struggling to survive in the larger room, but I wanted to be out of the hospital and in my own bed at home.
“You’re doing very well,” the doctor told me the next afternoon, as I sat paralysed by the severe coughing fit of a patient two rooms away.
“Will I get reinfected again?” I asked him, my shaky voice betraying nervousness.
“That’s not happened enough to suggest that reinfection is possible,” he said. “You’ll be alright. I’m happy to say that your uncle is doing extremely well…”
If uncle could do well, I could do well too, I kept telling myself, calming my nerves every time I got jumpy listening to a coughing fit down the corridor.
In the next 24 hours, the rooms filled up with more patients. This time, I didn’t hear them cough, but mourn in their effort to breathe. I had just turned off my iPhone after reading an article on how the coronavirus could be airborne. Every time the soft breeze caressed my face, I shuddered. When a nurse entered the room to inject medicines, I pushed myself closer to the wall.
Every time I built a cocoon of positivity around me to stay safe from the virus, a pinprick of fear would blow it up, making me wonder if someone would stuff me with more virus and knock me breathless.