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Kjell Gardeland, 67, helped people find meaning in life in her former profession as a family therapist. Now she’s struggling with rehabilitation after intensive care for COVID-19 in the early summer, and she’s learning to live with lungs that will never heal.
Kjell Gardeland, a former covid-19 patient who is now receiving rehab.
Kjell Gardeland, who lives at Midsommarkransen in Stockholm, says he’s been lucky. Unlike many others, he has survived while being treated on a ventilator at Huddinge Hospital. He has also received “absolutely better” rehabilitation, with an occupational therapist and a physical therapist who came to his apartment and helped him regain strength after the month in hospital.
– Without rehabilitation, he would not have gone as far as today, he says and continues:
– It takes time to get back. If you don’t get support and help in that, then you don’t fix it.
But he will never fully recover, a doctor told him about a week ago. The doctor examined X-rays of Kjell Gardeland’s lungs and found that the wounds caused by the disease were impossible to heal. Now he is waiting for the health service to investigate how he can get help with oxygen so he can walk more than 300-400 meters without having difficulty breathing.
– It is difficult to receive the message that my lungs are destroyed, that nothing can be done about it, that I must have oxygen. But I have to put up with it, I live anyway, he says.
– I usually say that you decide to live or die. If you just walk around and say you want to survive, then you have no hope, you have no future, and you just survive. If you decide to live, then you start creating opportunities to live as you have before.
His past professional life experiences as a family therapist, supervisor, and researcher have helped him cope with the mental strain of becoming seriously ill.
– There are those who have said that I have been fortunate to have that knowledge. That is partly true, at the same time it is not so easy to support and manage everything all the time. It’s just not strong, it doesn’t work that way.
He is grateful for the support of his wife and loved ones, and the friends who show up.
– You can’t go out the same way as before, like going to town and having a coffee. On the one hand, it is time consuming, and on the other hand, you don’t want to take the subway and fuss. Then I have friends who have a car, they come looking for me. It is worth no matter how much.
