[ad_1]
A health worker who spent 68 days in intensive care due to Covid-19 warned that “the disease does not care that you are young, fit and healthy.”
At the Health Department briefing tonight, Jerick Martin said he is “very grateful to be alive” and added that he wants people to realize the effect the virus can have on them.
He said, “He doesn’t care that you have a family who loves you and is waiting for you to come home.”
“Anyone can get it and anyone can get very sick.”
Martin, in his 30s, was hospitalized in Beaumont five days after testing positive for the virus.
He spent most of his time in the ICU on a ventilator and in an induced coma.
Mr. Martin said: “My doctor told me that I would be in an induced coma for a few days, but actually I woke up two months later.
“The impact of that is very scary and it will have lasting effects.”
Mr. Martin said that he had multi-organ failure and that his family had to deal with him being unable to respond to them, unable to hear them, surrounded by machinery and tubes in a hospital bed.
He said this was a “living hell” for his wife and she thought he was going to die. Martin said the hospital called his wife twice to say that she may not live.
Since leaving the hospital, he said that his life and health have changed. He has lost three and a half kilos of weight, suffers from diabetes, shortness of breath and hypertension – conditions he did not have before he was diagnosed with Covid-19.
He said, “Now, I need an inhaler and I’m short of breath going up or down the stairs.”
Mr. Martin added: “I don’t know what the long-term effects will be.
“Now I ask everyone to be careful. Take this virus very seriously.”
[ad_2]