“It’s not me anymore”: The nightmare of a Colombian man who has lived more than a thousand days with COVID-19

“I couldn’t take it with my soul,” Erica, a Colombian who lives in Milan, Italy, recalls when thinking about April 3, 2020. That day, alone in his apartment, he didn’t have the strength to breathe; Restlessness attacked him.

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Night was falling in the Lombard city, whose streets were marked by an unprecedented quarantine, where the lights and the sound of an ambulance approaching her building were the only things that could give her hope. She was ready to open the door for the paramedic: “I was saved by this guy who came dressed as an astronaut.”

Although he asked her to climb onto the stretcher, she did not want to “show off” in front of the surprised eyes of the neighbors who were looking out the windows, afraid of being close to a COVID-19 patient. The virus that created terror in the world. Erica went down the stairs from the fifth floor and fainted as she reached the door of the building: “They had to wait for me with the wheelchair, and that’s when I started crying. “I’ve never needed a wheelchair in my life.”

In the ambulance, on the way to the Città Studi Clinical Institute hospital, he wrote to his brothers in Colombia and sent them the contacts of his friends who would be aware of his situation. He did not alert his parents because the news “could have killed them”. “I couldn’t let go of that bomb,” he insisted in conversation with EL Tiempo.

I was afraid of losing consciousness, of being intubated. I thought this might be the end.

She recalls, “It was like watching my life go by on video, but I was no longer alone and I had to get medical help.” On April 3, she spent three weeks confined to the house, nursing a virus. Completed, which will change his existence. Reverse.

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