As judging from the title, my quarantine was, hopefully, a little more colourful than most of yours. Naturally, mine started with baking banana bread, deep cleaning my oven, and learning how to darn socks. I essentially became a pioneer home-wife and I was loving every minute of it – of course in between the panic attacks at the thought of our society collapsing, but that’s a different story.
Quarantine for me was a welcomed break, again, once the hyperventilating subsided. I was able to take some time for my body to recover from working two part-time jobs while balancing full-time school. My fiancé and I were able to start walking every day and enjoyed tackling new recipes for dinner – our sourdough starter is still growing as I type this. Because of these lifestyle additions which felt great, I decided to tackle a 30-day yoga challenge. I have always liked the idea of yoga and now I was able to make the long, arduous quarantine days amount to something. This, of course, is where my story will begin.
Now keep in mind, I am twenty-seven years “young”. Yoga is supposed to be calming, meditative, and healing even. So, when Adrianne, through the screen of YouTube, told me to put my feet over my head and enjoy the stretch, I of course obliged! And then, something felt off. I came out of the position with a twinge in my back which I attributed to the success of the stretch. I finished the rest of the routine and went on my merry way. The next day, productive Brianna struck again and decided to deep clean the fridge. And yes, it was that final move towards the crisper drawer that would do me in. My back completely seized, and I dropped.
I have thrown out my back before, so although I was frustrated, I knew the drill. Ice, walking, and Advil. A week or two and then I would be back onto Day 5 of the yoga challenge (yes, I was only on Day 4 at the time).
By week three, my back was only getting worse. I could no longer put my pants on without buckling to the floor and sitting was out of the question. Naturally, I come from a family of known back issues so the barrage of back injury supplies arrived at my door: an exercise ball chair, an Obus form back support, a Velcro back brace, and something we like to call The Life Preserver which is essentially a soft pool noodle that you strap to yourself while you sleep – I know, how glamourous.
By week four, the pain was getting even worse. I would sit on my ball chair, sobbing into FaceTime with my mom asking her when she thinks it will get better. I couldn’t move my legs without extreme pain and needed help to sit up or lay down. It was at this point that I pushed my fear of COVID aside and made myself a chiropractor appointment. Thankfully, this brought incredible relief and I was convinced that I was over the worst of it (this is what we, in the literary world, call foreshadowing). I was told walking is the best way to recover so I thought, what better way to keep walking than to go back to work in retail? Naturally, we were recalled back to work during all of this. I worked the next two days and needed to continuously find fixtures to sit on for a few seconds to keep the pain barely tolerable. My last shift was that Saturday, and by Sunday, things would change again.
Sunday started as my new normal day. Pain, pain, and more pain. Again, nothing was helping, and I was desperate for some relief. I made it through the day with not sitting down once, and by 10 p.m. I decided I was exhausted enough to go to bed. My fiancé helped me lower myself onto my bed, and then something shifted. When people claim to see “white” when experiencing blinding pain, they’re right. I have never experienced this amount of pain before. I could barely make a sound to convey how much pain I was in and at one point it felt like my eyes were rolling back in my head. My fiancé tried to move me further on the bed because, at this point, I was hanging half off the bed – this did not go well. It was at this moment, when I saw the fear in my fiancé’s eyes, that I knew this wasn’t just a normal “thrown out back”. We called our back expert, my mother, to see what we should do. And by “call”, I mean, when my fiancé called my parents with me sobbing and screaming in the background. After hanging up, he called 911.
After the administration of fast-acting morphine and the paramedic’s maneuver technique, they were able to prop me up enough to strap me to a stretcher chair – for those of you who are wondering, because I know I always wondered this, this is how patients get out of an apartment when a stretcher won’t fit or there are stairs.
This would be my first ever ambulance ride and due to COVID precautions, my fiancé was not allowed in the hospital with me. I had to do this all by myself. The paramedics themselves were amazing and incredibly comforting as they knew how foreign this all was. Once at the hospital, I was hooked up to fluids as they decided what to do with me. My first stop was X-Rays. Here’s a tip, it’s never a good sign when the doctor leads with, “I’m sorry, but we need to do X-Rays.” This wasn’t going to be fun.
Naturally, I was right, and it was torture. They had to contort me in positions that my back most definitely couldn’t do. It was over quick enough and they brought me back to the room. And then about twenty minutes later, the doctor returns with the same sentence, “I’m sorry.” It turns out the technician didn’t do them right the first time and we would need to do them all over again. The second time was far worse than the first time as they had to drag me from my gurney to the X-Ray table. Tears streaming down my face, I reassured them that I was okay.
A few hours later, I learn that I will need to be transferred to another hospital for a CT scan because they were worried that I have a dissected aorta – a comforting thing to hear at 3 a.m. So, I’m off in another ambulance. Luckily, the larger hospital was fairly close, unluckily, the roads leading towards the hospital might as well have been one giant pothole. Needless to say, the ride was not smooth.
Thankfully, my CT was quick and relatively painless – meaning, there were no Banshee screams, which I’ll take as a win – and then my nurse and I had to wait. Of course, our ride back to the smaller hospital was not scheduled to come for another hour and a half. Little did I know, I was about to have the ride of my life. We were not being picked up by an ambulance, but rather a third-party patient transport service. The drivers looked about early-twenties and were “shooting the shit” as they say, without even acknowledging my existence. The gurney was seemingly too small, and I was not strapped to it, so my only hope was to cling to the sides of the gurney for dear life. I never thought I would have to white-knuckle a gurney before, but I would not recommend this as a new Canada’s Wonderland ride. The only way I could describe this next voyage would be to relate it to Harry Potter’s Knight Bus, and boy, was I in for a bumpy ride. My gurney would slide towards the doors with every bump and my back would make me scream as tears continuously rolled down my face. I was in so much pain that my nurse had to ask them to drive more carefully. I could hear her grunts of frustration with every erratic move. I was terrified.
But here’s where the story takes another turn. By the time I arrived back to my smaller hospital (for legal reasons, I will not disclose either hospital by name). My room that I was in originally, was full. This smaller hospital is the only hospital in my town which means it only has two emergency rooms with beds. Because mine was full, I was put in the COVID ward. Three beds were occupied by men, each in a different stage of life and in a different stage of this virus. The frail old man could no longer talk as his only energy was focused on breathing. The other man, who looked around 60-years old, continued to talk in small spurts but his sentences were staccato’d by coughing fits. The last man was around middle age. He is the one who still haunts me to this day. Laid on his side he continuously begged for help. Gasping between gurgled breaths, he pleaded with the nurses and doctors to help him. There was no way he was getting any air into his mucus-filled lungs and he was maxed out on oxygen. From where my bed was, I had a direct view of him between the two curtains as they left a gap between them even when pulled shut. Because this was the COVID ward, all attention was on these three patients – rightfully so. That being said, this meant that for seven hours, I was completely forgotten about and was not given any pain medication or updates as to what was going on with me. The only thing that I could focus on was the man’s breathless pleading which caused me to sob from something other than pain for once in these past 12 hours.
Finally, the doctor returned to let me know that I had herniated two vertebrae in my spine – L4-L5 and L5-S1 for those spine nerds out there. He also told me that there was no real treatment other than time and pain management. With this information, I asked to be discharged so I could go home and leave this nightmare. I still couldn’t sit up and even with a combination of morphine and Toradol, it nothing to ease the pain. I used the bed handrail to pull myself up through my screams. I waited to have my multiple IV’s removed and managed to slide my feet into my sandals.
Naturally, when the paramedics brought me in the previous day, everything was done in such a whirlwind that I didn’t have time, nor the physical ability, to change out of my pj’s, let alone put on a bra. So here I am: “go-bag” in hand, grey nightgown on, no bra, and a rat nest of hair as I sobbed down the hospital hallway as I waited for my fiancé to pick me up. I’m pretty sure onlookers thought I was escaping from the psych ward.
It’s been almost nine weeks from when I was in the hospital, and I can finally sit at my desk to type this. I am finally off all of my meds and I was able to go back to work this week. This quarantine has been one of the most trying times I’ve had in many years and yet, the gargled breaths of that pleading man is still the worst thing I went through. That is the sound that keeps me up at night. His pleading is what I hear when I see someone not wearing a mask. So, if you have gotten this far in my post, please take this next sentence to heart. COVID is not “just” the flu. COVID does not “just” affect the elderly. COVID is not a joke. I am still traumatized by listening to the effects of COVID for seven hours straight, but that pales in comparison to actually contracting COVID. This virus is real, this virus is serious, and this virus does not care who you are. Wear your mask, wash your hands, and do your part. No one, and I repeat, no one, deserves to go through what those men were going through. I pray that they made it through and conquered COVID, but I’ll never know.
