Kentish Gazette Canterbury & District
‘Covid left me in coma for 23 days and battling PTSD - but I won’t be beaten’
Eight months ago Keith Watson’s life changed forever. Here he tells Jack Dyson of his 91 days in hospital battling coronavirus, and how the longterm effects of the deadly infection continue to haunt him...
When Keith Watson flew out to Lanzarote for a holiday with a number of friends, he joked about the handful of people wearing masks as they waited for their flights at Gatwick Airport Coronavirus seemed like a distant problem; the outbreak was in its early stages and the country’s first lockdown had not yet been imposed.
But shortly after returning to his Herne Bay home, the 53-year-old asthmatic found himself struggling to breathe. “I felt a bit rough – I thought I had a bad hangover from the holiday,” Keith remembers, in between short breaths. “I just started getting worse and worse as the week went on.
“I thought I was having a really bad asthma attack because I believed I would never get Covid. A lot of people still think like that today.” Paramedics were called to the property in Linden Avenue three times over the next week, before the dad-of-three was rushed to the QEQM Hospital on March 20.
Shortly after arriving at the infirmary, the bricklayer was hooked up to a ventilator and put into a drug-induced coma. He was told by medics that he would not open his eyes for the next 72 hours. Instead, this was the first of 23 nights he spent unconscious, as doctors and nurses attempted to wrest him from the brink of death.
“They wheeled me into a room at the hospital and the doctor said, ‘Mr Watson, you’re in a bit of a way. What we’re thinking is your body needs a rest to breathe, so I’ll ventilate you’,” he recalls.
“I was tired to the point of exhaustion and I didn’t know where I was or what I was doing. I was panting all the time as well; it was like someone was standing on my chest.
“I started thinking about what the doctor said and thought I was in a bad state.
I texted my wife and three children to tell them how proud I am of them, and give them my love and my goodbye.”
At the time, more than two thirds of the country’s coronavirus patients who required mechanical ventilators died. Doctors suspected Keith had contracted Covid. However, his family – of whom his wife and two daughters also experienced fevers – did not learn that he had returned a positive test until six days into his hospital stay.
X-rays also showed that the Newcastle United fan had pneumonia in both of his lungs, which had filled his chest with liquid to such an extent that he says he was “basically drowning”.
Over the following three weeks, Keith’s wife, Sarah, was twice warned that her husband was going to die after his oxygen levels dropped, his heart started to flag and he suffered kidney failure. Meanwhile, he remained lost in his dreams, regularly seeing images akin to those in Alice in Wonderland as he lay in operating theatres which had been hastily converted into intensive care units. “You don’t know what’s going on. It was how I would imagine being on a trip,” he continues. “I only had one dream where I wasn’t trapped.” Twenty-three days after Keith was placed in the coma, doctors started to rouse him.
But due to the number of sedatives in his system, it took him a further two weeks to come round and be weaned off the respirator.
Keith became aware that he had been given a tracheostomy and that he was no longer mobile, which meant he remained fixed to his position in bed.
The workman also discovered to his shock that his hands had swelled considerably and that his toes had changed colour. Family members feared his feet would be amputated.
“My toes were jet black and curling over” he remembers. “There was a shoot
ing pain from my feet I’d never felt before. It was agony.
“My fingers were going purple and were double the size.
“It was difficult in hospital. Because it took two weeks for the sedation to leave my system, I was really disorientated. “Because I’d been horizontal for four weeks, a lot of my muscle mass wasted away, so I couldn’t walk, use my arms, pick anything up, use my asthma pump or open a pack of crisps.
“But it was really good because the doctors and nurses worked so hard – you could see them running up and down the corridors throughout their shifts.” Keith spent 95 days - 41 of them in intensive care - at the QEQM and the Kent and Canterbury Hospitals.
At that point, it was the longest a coro
navirus sufferer had spent being treated for the illness.
When he finally arrived home in June, more than 100 friends and neighbours lined the street to clap and cheer him as he made his way through the front door. “I couldn’t believe there were so many people here – it was humbling because I didn’t know that many people liked me. It was really lovely; it was a great surprise,” he says.
“I felt like I didn’t know where I was. I’d lost three stone in hospital, so I felt like half the person I was when I’d left the house.
“It’s humbling. I owe the doctors and nurses so much for being here.” Now, Keith is battling an array of symptoms of Long Covid, the umbrella term for the long-lasting effects of the illness.
He is unable to walk more than 150 metres unaided, suffers from neuropathic pains in his feet, fatigue, shortness of breath and post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).
Keith’s son, George, describes his father’s road to recovery as “an ongoing i battle”.
“It’s taken him ages to start to walk again because he was laying down for so long.
“The pain in his feet still prevents him from walking much, but he needs to walk in order to help his blood circulation,” the 23-year-old 2 says.
“The way the PTSD manifests itself is that t Covid’s constantly in his thoughts and a it’s hard for him to change that. He’s at a home now, basically disabled, not working w and without anything to do, so he just has constant reminders on the telly of it.
“It’s really hard for him to escape from the t reality of what’s happened. It really wreaked w havoc with his mental state.” Although asthmatic, Keith says the condition c was not debilitating and that he had never been hospitalised following an attack.
The brickie is hoping to raise awareness of the severity of Covid-19 and is urging greater numbers of people to wear masks. “I’m still learning to walk,” he adds, “I’ve just got to build it up. A doctor said I might never get my foot working properly again.
“I’ve been a little bit breathless this week; I don’t know if that’s down to Covid “I’ve got a psychologist now to try to level me out a bit.
They’ve said to me that I’ve had the equivalent of a major trauma and have PTSD; it’s given me anxiety and depression. I can watch the telly and just weep.” Keith is determined to keep battling through his recovery.
“It feels like this is my second life because I should be dead.
“I won’t be beaten.”