‘All I can remember of that period is wild dreams’
ROCHDALE MP Tony Lloyd has spoken out about what it’s like to have coronavirus and how the NHS saved his life.
The veteran Labour MP, 70, spent 25 days in Manchester Royal Infirmary with COVID-19, including 10 days in an induced coma on a ventilator.
He was discharged from hospital on Monday and is now recovering with family in Manchester.
Mr Lloyd spoke to the The Observer about his humbling experience with COVID-19, his appreciation for the NHS and whether having the virus has changed him.
The MP said he’d been feeling ‘ropey for two weeks’ before he went into hospital on April 2.
“I’d woken up really early, about 4am, and I just thought: this isn’t right”, Mr Lloyd said.
“I’d perhaps been in denial until then. You know what northerners are like: after 200 years of having manure poured over our heads, we are used to soldiering on.”
He phoned 111 who, to his surprise, said an ambulance would be sent to him straight away because of his symptoms.
He had a high temperature and was struggling to breath.
“I think I was relieved to be taken seriously. There’s a credibility thing”, Mr Lloyd said.
“You don’t want to ring up and someone says you’re acting daft, you’ve just got an ingrowing toenail or whatever.”
The MP said it was ‘difficult to remember’ what happened next, but that an ambulance turned up at his house and took him to the Manchester Royal Infirmary.
His family didn’t know he was in hospital at that point and couldn’t track him down until the following day, when he was still in A&E waiting for a bed.
He was then moved on to the COVID ward and because of his breathing difficulties, had to wear a pressurised oxygen hood.
After two days on the ward his temperature was still high - at nearly 40C at one point - so he was moved to intensive care.
Mr Lloyd said: “That’s when the doctor told me they were going to put me in an induced coma.
“I can’t remember it, but I must have been conscious then, because I did manage to ring Angharad, the eldest of my four children, and tell her what was happening.
“I’d named her my “designated person”, the designated busybody who would phone up and talk to the doctors.
“She’s since said it was one of the worst conversations she has ever had.
“Apparently I sounded very faint and weak and said that I just felt so tired and that I was going on a ventilator.
“It was my youngest daughter’s birthday that day and she says I kept asking if she and everyone else in the family was OK.”
Mr Lloyd said a consultant told him that there must be a medical judgement as to whether the patient can come through the ‘brutal experience’ of being intubated and kept alive.
Because he had no underlying health conditions and was reasonable fit, he was ‘one of the lucky ones.’
“I was on a ventilator for 10 days and in ICU for 19 days in total. All I can remember from that period is wild dreams”, the MP said.
“There was one when I was stuck on a constant loop on the Manchester to Paris train.
“The good thing about my dreams is that they offer a better train service than this government.
“I was desperate to get off the train but I couldn’t. I knew it wasn’t where I ought to be, I was trapped.
“The doctors told me later this is quite normal. It’s a trauma thing.”
Mr Lloyd spent 10 days in an induced coma before being woken up and put onto a ventilator.
He said he later learned that the day after he was put on it, Boris Johnson was admitted to hospital in London with the virus.
“He said something when he came out that I relate to, when he praised the people who cared for him”, Mr Lloyd said.
“The professionalism is extraordinary but it’s the humanity of it, the 150,000 small human gestures every hour that makes the NHS a human institution.
“When I was moved out of ICU I watched a guy across from me who couldn’t feed himself.
“Every mealtime, a nurse took time to sit with him and gently feed him.
“I watched young women cleaning old men and that’s what they did because they care, not because there’s an enormous pot of gold for them at their end of their double shift.
“There was this particular nurse who walked me to the door when I was discharged.
“She supported me because I was unsteady and as I went off she clapped me. It’s tremendous, really, because it’s her and people like her who had done the work, not me.”
The MP said many of the doctors and nurses who cared for him were not British-born, which is ‘something we should all reflect on.’
He said it was the first time he’s used the NHS properly and that the experience has made him realise how ‘valuable it is,’
“It is so worth fighting for and never again can we have a decade of underfunding where we end up without the ventilators, without the doctors and nurses”, he added.
“How can it be that we haven’t got enough personal protective equipment?
“How can it be a matter of random luck as to whether the people looking after your mum in a care home are protected?
“We have to learn the lessons from all of that.
“I was watching something about a nurse who died in Harrogate and she had said to her family that the PPE wasn’t all it should be.
“But she went to work and people like her saved my life. So I am bound to feel a tremendous sense of humility.”
He was discharged from hospital last Monday (April 27), and on Tuesday resigned as shadow Northern Ireland secretary.
He plans to stay on as MP for Rochdale but will step down from the frontbench while he fully recovers.
For now, he is living with family in Manchester as he said he ‘couldn’t possibly live independently at this stage’ and ‘just having a shower feels like doing three days’ work.’
Doctors told him his cough ‘might linger’ but he doesn’t know what the long-term effects of having COVID-19 might be.
“I don’t know if it’s changed me”, Mr Lloyd said.
“Ask most Labour people if they like the NHS and they will say, yes, it’s the thing of which we are most proud.
“But what this has done is translate for me a principle -- believing in free public health at the point of use -- into something that’s about the people I saw delivering that healthcare and the patients whose journeys I shared.
“What it’s done is focused rather than changed what I see - particularly my longterm belief that our society is disordered.
“If this pandemic doesn’t make us rethink what kind of world we want to live in then I’m not sure what will.
“We will have to use this experience as the anvil on which we beat out this new world.
“This is not just about fair pay, but actually how we value different things in society.
“Looking back, how could any government have underfunded the NHS for 10 years?
“Ask the public today who is in favour of that and, apart from George Osborne, no one would put their hand up. Even Boris Johnson doesn’t think that now.
“In that sense it really is about saying we need a different evaluation of things, a different order of things.
“This isn’t being romantic or naive. Most of us know that from time to time you might need these services.
“But now we have seen a society laid out in front of us that is in distress and things are not going right, and it will be some time until it begins to go right.
“We have to begin to use the resources of our society for all of us, not just some of us.”