LIFE IN PIECES
When coronavirus took hold of British stylist Sophia Neophitou-Apostolou it hit with a vengeance, taking her into a coma and to the brink of death. Piecing back the time she lost, she reflects on how she’s changed.
Coronavirus took British stylist Sophia Neophitou-Apostolou to the brink of death.
“WE’RE IN LOCKDOWN,” comes a voice out of the darkness. “What are you talking about?” I respond, and immediately realise that I no longer recognise my own voice. Later I will discover that this is because of the damage done to the larynx when a tube is forced down the throat. It is April 17, and for the past month I have been in the grip of a disease so infamous it has shut down nations and killed hundreds of thousands of people. But I can’t get my head around that yet.
In truth, the last thing I remember is getting into an ambulance four weeks earlier. It was the third week of March, and since returning from fashion month, I’d not been feeling at all well. Not scarily bad, but certainly not great. As anyone who knows me – at home or in my industry – can attest, I normally live at 1,000 miles an hour. But I was achey with what felt like a classic flu – or “fashion flu”, as we call the inevitable slump that follows a whirlwind round of shows and dinners, late nights and minimal sleep, all while thigh-to-thigh on the front row for weeks on end.
I had no cough, and am 54, with no underlying health condition to put me at risk. “It can’t be Covid,” I said to my husband, Apostolos, as I dutifully quarantined myself for two weeks at home in London. Typically, as editor-in-chief of 10 Magazine, the fashion quarterly I founded 20 years ago (this year, in fact), I spend my days after fashion month talking with my team, assigning stories and planning shoots. I kept at it from home, yet, as the days passed, I kept hearing stories of other stylists and editors I’d been with in Milan and Paris getting ill. Then my breathing became shallow and my temperature began to soar. I took more cold and flu medication, but I couldn’t get my fever down. It was pre-lockdown and information was scarce, so when, on March 20, my temperature hit 40, I dialled emergency. As I struggled into the ambulance, I saw the faces of my husband and son on the doorstep of our north London house. I began to cry with panic.
Then: a blur. Piecing together my weeks in hospital – and there were many, some on the very edge of death – feels to me now like searching for scattered images in an unreachable dream. I remember the man giving me oxygen in the ambulance while I told him I didn’t want to leave my family. I can picture a long corridor at Barnet Hospital, where I was left waiting on a bed because the wards were at capacity. But I don’t remember the texts and photographs I apparently sent during those first two days. Recently, a friend re-forwarded a picture I’d sent him: me sitting in bed wearing an oxygen mask, taken on March 21. It is the most unsettling sort of strangeness to see an image of yourself from a day you don’t remember; even more so when it is an image that you yourself captured. I still can’t figure out if the reason I can’t recall my face behind the mask that day is that I am unable to, or because it felt so traumatic I won’t let myself.
Because what I do remember is not being able to breathe. It is true what they say about coronavirus: it is like drowning. When you try to catch your breath, you can’t. You gasp for air. It is as confusing and terrifying as if all the oxygen were suddenly sucked out of the world and there isn’t enough left for you. On March 22 they moved me to the ICU, by which point I was barely conscious. My husband received a call to say my situation was so serious that I would be put into a coma and that a ventilator would take over my breathing, perhaps for three or four days.
As we have all learnt during these past few months, a ventilator is not the soothing saviour of the ICU. It is violent and invasive and a last resort. A coma is induced, drugs administered to force the respiratory muscles to relax, a tube inserted deep into the airway while humidified oxygen is pumped into the lungs as an air pressure system takes over. Once you’re on it, the odds are not good: 60 to 70 per cent of intubated patients don’t make it; you are more likely to die than not. For those who live, there are grave fears, too. Held in stasis, organs falter and muscles atrophy, spelling long-term recovery that can end in brain damage, heart, liver or kidney disease, and having to learn to walk again.
I was on a ventilator for nearly four weeks. Hovering in a blackedout world and separated from my family, the most dramatic weeks of global news passed me by as I clung to the edges of life, a stranger to the world. I have no memories of those 25 days – only visions. In my mind’s eye, all the medical equipment turned into elaborately lacquered Chinese furniture, and the viewing station from which the medics could see me appeared to be on the far side of a glistening swimming pool. I saw a nurse on the other side of the glass and called to her in my dream: “Why won’t you let me come and swim!” Then, of course, there were the masked faces – where dreams met reality. When I shut my eyes, I can still see them floating over me.
In so many ways, the torture of this time is borne by your family. A necessary cruelty with ICUs overloaded with coronavirus patients, relatives were allowed to call the staff only once a day for an update. I can only imagine the effect mine had on my family, initially told it would be only a few days, as I drifted helplessly into my second week and my condition worsened. Pneumonia came. Then sepsis. A typical update might be: “Her temperature continued to rise, she’s breathing very slowly on the machine.” Twice they tried to wake me; twice they failed. Family and friends became acutely aware of the race against time and began to wonder: “Even if she wakes up, who will she be?”
Then, miraculously, I returned from the brink. Beyond the extraordinary medical care from the NHS doctors, nurses and support staff at Barnet Hospital, I still can’t understand what saved me when death was so close. I felt so blessed, so lucky that I had made it through the darkness. The biggest question that hangs over me now, that haunts me, actually, is: “Why?” I felt confused, mainly. Of course, when I first came round, I was simply concerned with the basics: Where am I? What day is it? Why can’t I move? I had zero sense of what had happened and was instinctively furious that I was being ‘imprisoned’ against my will. Nothing the doctors said made any sense. The best analogy for me is that it was like I was searching for the final missing piece of a jigsaw puzzle that was lost, hidden, out of my reach. I started phoning home and shouting: “Get me a wheelchair, get me out of here! I’m going to call an Uber!” I didn’t understand why I couldn’t see anybody. I was delusional.
A few weeks on, I can scarcely believe what bad shape I was in physically. Having pulled through the virus, I was impossibly weak. I couldn’t lift my arms, and I could hardly talk at first. My lungs were so feeble that pulling myself into a chair, I was as breathless as if I’d run up eight flights of stairs. A wheelchair became necessary, and I remember being especially upset about my eyesight. At the beginning, everything was scarily blurred. But then – gradually – it wasn’t. Bit by bit the pieces began to fall into place, at least a little, even if so much of it still doesn’t feel real to me. Watching the BBC Two documentary series Hospital, about corona wards, helped, as did the diary of my treatment that the doctors had kept for me in hospital, which made for chilling reading. It was also crucial – an important tool to help me piece together my life after the black hole of the ICU. My strength began to increase, and eventually I was well (and lucky) enough to move to the Ascot Rehab centre, which my brother, Phidos, had researched and found for me.
Then came the day I was allowed to see my husband and my son, Zacharia – albeit at a distance – in the garden there. It was the most extraordinary moment of my life. It had been so many weeks since the ambulance had come for me and, for them especially, it was a reunion that had felt as if it might never arrive. Every day, my sister, Ermioni, brought my favourite Greek dishes, giving me a taste of home. My friends would text and text, each message making my heart soar. I felt overwhelmed by love, and would cry at the smallest of kindnesses.
Rehab was a godsend. Slowly, I began to untangle all the things that had happened to me, started to walk again. I can’t pretend it wasn’t hard. But I’m a positive person and threw myself in to a full recovery regime: intensive physio and cognitive and psychotherapy sessions to help put me back together.
And then, finally, after four weeks of painstaking progress, I was allowed to come home. When it comes to describing the feeling of elation and the tears of joy that I shed when I walked back through my front door, words fail me. I sobbed when I could finally hold my boys in my arms and kiss them. I felt such a profound sense of thankfulness. And one of change, too.
It is a reset – in my case, a terrifying one. But isn’t it true for all of us? Don’t we all now feel that little bit more conscious of how we should live our lives, weighing up what actually matters, what truly deserves our attention, and how precious our relationships are? When all is said and done, all we have is the time we are given together. Many questions still hang over the future, but as I sit here, enjoying a European summer I thought I might never see, I know one thing for sure. I’m going to use mine well.
When you try to catch your breath, you can’t. You gasp for air. It is as confusing and terrifying as if all the oxygen were suddenly sucked out of the world