At the end of May, a patient came to us with shortness of breath. A few days earlier he had suspected he had caught a cold, he told me. As a sufferer of chronic sinus infections, this would not have been unusual for him. But his shortness of breath got worse and worse until he finally didn’t know what else to do and decided to go to the hospital. That was right, because it wasn’t a simple sinus thing. It was a serious post-Covid condition – and for me the first patient with long-term damage after a corona infection.
The man was in his early 50s and thus significantly younger than our average clientele. His corona disease was ten weeks ago, that was in mid-March. After that he noticed a drop in performance. But overall, everything was fine. He was even back at work until shortly before he was admitted to the hospital.
Now his condition was bad. In the case of shortness of breath, those affected concentrate so much on breathing that they soon stop eating. no more drinking And no more sleep. My patient’s last sleep was two days ago – he was awake for 48 hours at home and persevered. Shortness of breath often causes sufferers to develop such a fear of suffocation in their sleep that they just stay awake. Such a drastic lack of sleep also drains energy. At some point the body will be exhausted.
Intensive care specialist Pola Gülberg from the Ebersberger district clinic.
(Photo: Peter Hinz-Rosin)
And so it was less than four days before my patient was lying in a prone position connected to a ventilator – a position in which you typically see corona positives in the intensive care unit. However, he had been negative for weeks. We had to take care of him like this for two weeks. Only then was he sufficiently recovered for us to wean him off the ventilator. After another week with us, he began his rehab.
My impression is that a lot of people are not aware of one thing: Yes, Omicron-infected people no longer end up in intensive care units as often as was the case with other virus variants. But the virus still attacks the body and weakens all organs. If those affected come into contact with germs, bacteria or another virus some time after the infection has been overcome, this can cause far greater damage than without a previous corona infection. As with my patient, who ended up on the ventilator two months later.
The man was my first post-Covid patient. He’s not my only one for a long time now.
Pola Gülberg is an intensive care nurse. In this column, the 38-year-old talks about her work at the district clinic in Ebersberg every week. The collected texts are below sueddeutsche.de/thema/Auf Station to find.