My family and I are eternally grateful to the doctors of Deenanath Hospital for saving my father.

To really understand how difficult it has been for me as a daughter, an individual and a person with bipolar II disorder, I must burden you with some details of what happened over the past couple of months. 

I came to Pune to visit my parents on August 19. The plan was to stay here for three weeks and head back to Bangalore. Little did I know that our lives would be completely turned upside down. In spite of being vaccinated, my father got COVID, followed by post-COVID complications and ended up spending 54 days in the hospital. As of December 3, I am still in Pune. 

This experience has been harrowing and terrifying to say the least. But it also taught me some invaluable things- 

1. Despite having bipolar II disorder, I am capable of being a reliable and responsible caregiver. 
2. Everyone has guardian angels and they come in different forms when you need them- friends, family, doctors etc.
3. Having faith in God or a higher power helps keep hope alive. 

In this post, I will write about my and my family’s collective experiences during the 54 days in the hospital. 

Our own September 11

I was supposed to leave Pune on September 11.  However, on September 5, my father started experiencing intermittent fever. Around the 8th, he started coughing, which got much worse on the 10th.

Not only was dad coughing continuously through the night, he was also hallucinating. My mother and I took him to the hospital the next morning. His oxygen saturation or O-SAT had dropped to 65% (Normal O-SAT is between 95% – 100%). He had contracted COVID. What’s more, both Mom and I, also vaccinated, tested positive too. This was two days after I had taken an RT PCR test, which turned out negative. Makes you rethink the RT PCR test before traveling, doesn’t it? 

My father was immediately put on oxygen and had to be admitted to the COVID ICU. Of course, none of this happens within minutes. The ER was crazy. Dad was delirious and hooked to various machines. Mom was beginning to feel the fatigue that comes with COVID. I, for some strange reason, was completely in control.

I had remembered to throw SOS pills in my bag. Here was a perfect situation for a full blown panic attack and yet, somehow, some other part of my brain had kicked in. I wasn’t thinking, I was just running around getting paperwork and such done.  

Silence

We were not allowed to see him when he was taken to the COVID ICU and were summarily sent home to quarantine. We had no knowledge and no contact with my father or the doctors. 

For my mother and me, the days seemed to drag on. The anxiety and tension were palpable. We didn’t feel like eating or doing anything. From the third day on, I forced mom to watch a movie with me every night. Mind you, my mother is the rock of the family and not prone to emotional drama but this had shaken her up. 

Usually my husband is the super calm one and manages things in emergencies, but he was in New York. He assured me that I could handle the responsibility and be the caregiver. He flew in within two days and stayed at a hotel because we were quarantining. Till I was out of quarantine, he went to the hospital everyday, put on a PPE suit to see dad, spoke with the doctors and wrote detailed updates so we knew what was happening. 

I was under tremendous stress and experienced unimaginable anxiety, especially because we were unable to see Dad, but I was holding it together. There was this constant nagging thought (still is) of “when will I slip”. On the outside, it looked like I was in control but on the inside fissures were beginning to form. This too used up a lot of my mental energy and I was unable to sleep days on end. I called my psychiatrist and he made some changes to the medicines to help me through this period. 

Rollercoaster

Dad first got better before getting much much worse. By the time I was done with my quarantine, he had been shifted to the regular, non COVID ICU. I could finally see him and meet the doctors. He was improving, his oxygen needs were reducing. So my husband left. The next day, (last day of mom’s quarantine), dad was back on 100% oxygen. 

The doctors told me he had contracted secondary infections and they didn’t know what they were. Nor was he in a condition to be wheeled around for tests. The only solution was to put him on an invasive or mechanical ventilation. This is a procedure where the patient is completely sedated and oxygen is pumped through a tube that goes through the mouth and trachea. I had to make a decision “now”.  In a condition like my father’s, at his age, the survival rate of ventilated patients is about 10%. 

I felt completely ill equipped, overwhelmed and shattered. I called my husband crying and told him to come back from Bangalore. I called my sister in Japan and then my mother and told her to come immediately. I wiped away my tears, took a few deep breaths, put a smile on my face and went to see Dad with the doctor. Being the optimist that he is, he said “why are we waiting if this is the only option?”  

When I saw him ventilated, I felt brokenhearted. I had only seen people like that on TV shows and movies. There were tubes everywhere, machines beeping, eyes half open, nurses and doctors monitoring him, more like a research subject than a human being. I desperately did not want him to die. He had always taken care of me and I could not let him go. 

Through the night he got much worse. His blood pressure plummeted. There wasn’t enough time to wait for test reports so the doctors started pumping him with medicines. His body had gone into septic shock. The next stage would be multiple organ failure. 

My husband came back from Bangalore and my sister from Japan. At least now we had our little circle of faith at home. 

My husband started calling doctors in Delhi and America for second, third, fourth opinions. They all said that the protocol sounded right. This was also clear from what we saw. At some point, the desperation gave way to numbness, exhaustion and disbelief. It was a waiting game. 

Four days later, my father’s condition started stabilizing. Four more days later, he was off the ventilator and breathing through a tracheal tube. His sedation was stopped and it took him three days to become conscious. On day 38, he was eventually moved to a private room. On November 3, after having spent 54 days in the hospital, he came home. 

The Hospital Effect 

Relief washed over me as we brought him home and the numbness I was feeling went away. Its place was taken over by a deluge of emotions that I couldn’t begin to fathom. This was a different kind of stress. 

I left the hospital on November 3, but the hospital hasn’t left me. Visiting the ICU is a harrowing experience. All are serious patients and many are unconscious. There is a constant beeping from all the machines the patients are hooked to. You get to know relatives of patients from spending hours sitting outside the ICU. And if you don’t see the relatives, you pray that the patient has been discharged. In one stretch of two and a half weeks, five people in the ICU died (that we know of). 

The smell is possibly the worst- a mix of medicines, cleaning agents and bodily fluids. It doesn’t go away. I can still smell it in my head. In addition, there are the phone calls from the hospital at all hours, the wait, the tension you feel getting from home to the hospital; I can still sense it, even though I’m at home. 

Moving on

There were so many of me. The daughter that broke a little with a very real possibility of losing her father;  the daughter who was the primary caregiver and decision maker; the companion to my mother; the reassuring sister to my sister when she was miles away; the update conveyer to all our friends and family; and finally the individual with a mental illness, desperately finding ways to not fall apart. 

With each passing day, I started feeling more and more exhausted. I had to dig deep inside my reserves to find the physical and mental strength to just keep going. Now that dad is home, there is time and mind space for the tightly bundled emotions to unravel. Right now I feel like I’m walking on a mental tightrope. If I happen to lose even one moment of awareness, I’ll be Humpty Dumpty. 

To be continued… 

I am not a mental health professional. All blog posts are based on my subjective experiences and opinions.