Hugh was given 10 minutes to say goodbye to his family before being put on a ventilator. His chances? 50-50.

Ten days later came the call his wife prayed for...

ROLLING over on to his left side, Hugh Mullally wondered where his bedside table had gone. Come to think of it, his duvet had been replaced by a white sheet too. How odd. Was his mind playing tricks? Had he been dreaming? Then came a nervous twitch in the pit of his stomach. Suddenly, in fragments, he began to recall the past two weeks.

He was not tucked up in bed next to his wife, Karen, at their home near Bath. He was in hospital, in intensive care, coming round from a nine-day medically induced coma, after becoming critically ill with coronavirus. A tune popped into his head – Who Knows Where The Time Goes? by Sandy Denny, his favourite folk song.

One of the last things he remembered was telling Karen, daughter Tara, 24, and son Ciaran, 23, to listen to it, as a way of remembering him. And as he began to take in his wider surroundings – the bleeping, the bright lights, the blurred bodies – the music played over and over in his head. It was all Hugh, a 65-year-old IT consultant, could focus on.

Remarkably, only a week and a half earlier, doctors had given him just ten minutes to say his final goodbyes. Having suffered worsening symptoms at home for a week, on March 20, he was admitted to hospital. The next day, at 4am, his blood oxygen levels plummeted. His only hope for survival was intensive care: being put on the ventilator – a machine that takes over the work of breathing when the disease causes the lungs to fail.

The treatment buys patients vital time to fight off the infection and recover. But it is invasive: a tube, attached to the equipment, is inserted through the throat and down into the lungs. Patients must be heavily sedated or fully anaesthetised to tolerate it.

Hugh was told it was likely he wouldn’t wake up. As he waited to be put to sleep, he called Karen to tell her what was going to happen. ‘I had so little time, I had to think of something meaningful, quickly,’ he says. That’s when he stumbled on the idea of a song. The lyrics are about treasuring the precious time you have with loved ones.’

Later that day, Hugh’s family gathered in their local park to listen to it – and pray for their dad and husband – together.

BUT Hugh did recover. Ever so slowly he began to wake up. The first few conscious hours were ‘dream-like, sort of a fantasy’, he says. ‘I remember a faint itch inside my chest, where the tube of the ventilator had been.’ The sense of total physical weakness was something Hugh, who plays for a local veterans’ football team, found especially tough.

‘I remember someone asking me if I could move from my bed,’ he says. ‘ And I couldn’t. Not for days. My legs were like lead.’

‘I’d been fed nutrients and water through a drip for ten days, so there was the constant feeling of unbelievable thirst – even though I wasn’t dehydrated. A nurse nearby must have noticed, despite me not being able to talk properly. So she dabbed a wet sponge around my mouth so I could feel the moisture, without swallowing much. It felt wonderful.’

Karen knew to expect a phone call from her husband – doctors had been providing the family with daily updates. But when she heard his voice for the first time, two days after he woke up, she struggled to speak between tears of joy. ‘She cried and cried with happiness and disbelief that I’d made it. We both did,’ says Hugh.

The family weren’t allowed into his room – but two weeks later, when he was transferred from intensive care to a coronavirus ward, they could see each other through the window beside Hugh’s bed. ‘The first time the kids came was overwhelming,’ he says. ‘They shouted about how proud they were of me through the window.’

But it wasn’t until almost a month later – after two weeks of social distancing, post-discharge, were they finally reunited. He says: ‘My son Ciaran stared at me and said, “Dad – do you think it’s OK for me to hug you now?” ‘I didn’t want to let him go.’ Having been in hospital since the end of March, Hugh was unaware of the ‘new normal’, now familiar to the rest of the country. ‘When I was lucid again, my 90-year-old mother called and said: “Can we Zoom?” ’ he remembers. ‘I thought: What the hell does that mean?’ Now, two months on, he is enjoying two- hour walks and planning a five-a-side football match.

Intensive care has always had chilling connotations – even before the pandemic. If you’re admitted to the ward for the most acutely ill, it’s assumed that you are nearing the end. Many patients, such as Hugh, will be sedated and attached to ventilators to support their failing organs. Tubes are fed through the wrist, neck, arm and groin, to clear waste quickly and offer delivery of medication. Potent painkillers and anti-infection medication mean most are in and out of consciousness.

About eight per cent of people in their 50s with Covid-19, and 12 per cent of those in their 60s, require hospital treatment. About one in five people hospitalised are taken into an intensive treatment unit (ITU). Half of these patients, sadly, lose their lives.

But Dr Ron Daniels, intensive care consultant at Birmingham Hospital, urges people not to think of this kind of treatment as the end of the road. ‘Last week I said goodbye to a 75-year-old with Covid-19 who had left intensive care after being on a ventilator for almost two months,’ he says. ‘We bought him a bottle of whisky to celebrate when he started to recover – he said he’d been craving a tipple.’

Equally astonishing is the story of 62- year- old Walter Roux, who survived eight weeks in intensive care – two of which he spent ventilated. The railway executive, from Surrey, began to feel unwell after returning from Italy in February. Walter, who l i ves alone, grew increasingly breathless, with rocketing fevers. Scared for his life, he called an ambulance.

IN HOSPITAL, he tested positive for Covid-19. He recalls a discussion with his doctor, who was telling him to eat supper, even though he felt queasy. And then, nothing.

His condition deteriorated rapidly, causing Walter to sink into unconsciousness.

Doctors rushed him to ITU where he was fully sedated, and ventilated. Over the following days – while in a coma – he suffered two minor heart attacks and his kidneys began to fail. Ten days later, he woke up. The ‘spider web’ of tubes around him was the biggest shock. Although no longer on a full ventilator, he’d been given a tracheostomy – a tube inserted through a hole made in the windpipe. This was attached to another type of ventilation machine, supporting Walter’s weakened lungs, which doesn’t require the patient to be sedated.

‘The first thing I did was move my mouth over and over, trying to speak,’ he says. The tube of a tracheostomy affects the voice- box – rendering patients speechless. ‘It took a while to realise no sound was coming out,’ he recalls. ‘Not that I had much energy to even try. I had to communicate by writing to nurses on pieces of paper or my phone. And knowing that my children wouldn’t be able to hear my voice was very painful. When I woke up I thought that I was in my house. But everything was upside down. I kept seeing strange objects that wouldn’t belong in a hospital. Then they’d disappear.’

Sedative drugs and painkillers are known to cause hallucinations and ‘ post- operative delirium’ in up to half of all patients. Walter says: ‘ It’s stopped me sleeping, which is traumatic in intensive