“I was told there was a 95% probability I was going to die. I would flip between hope and despair.' Paul Thorn tells BuzzFeed News how to survive 12 weeks in isolation.
“For three months, I didn’t see people’s faces,” says Paul Thorn. “When I was in isolation everybody I saw was in a mask.”
As well as entire populations around the world being in lockdown, with hundreds of millions only being allowed to leave their homes for designated reasons, many, including the 1.5 million Britons now being “shielded” from COVID-19, cannot leave at all. Such house arrest may be manageable for people cared for by loved ones, but for those who live alone, a starker picture awaits.
It was here he contracted TB, he says, due to a clinical error in which a particular test was performed on a patient believed to have TB, on the open ward, sparking an outbreak. Seven others caught it. “After a while I couldn’t watch TV because it was too busy,” he says. “The visual stimulation made me very tired.”
As the clinicians entered, performing test after test, the young man with the terrible condition became a medical curiosity. “People saw me as no more than a disease when they walked in. They saw me as a case. It was completely dehumanising.”He felt the instinct of those who entered. “It’s a natural reaction to recoil from anything that is dangerous,” he says. “Most people wanted to be in and out of that room as quickly as possible.
A high temperature and low stimulation unpicked his sense of time, so that fever dream and daylight reality enmeshed. There was something else, though, that didn’t exactly help. It wasn’t words, though. He got an indelible marker and started a tally on the wall of each day he was in there, to count the days and keep track of time. “Like Robinson Crusoe,” he says. “The sister [nurse] came in and said, ‘You can’t do that!’ And my answer was, ‘What are you going to do? Lock me up?’”The whole point of his behaviour, he now understands, was about control; something that had been removed, undermining his dignity and sense of self.
But he missed touch. “That mattered,” he says, quietly. “Not everything is resolvable.” Compassion from one particular nurse made it bearable, however. “Her name was Jenny Williams. She used to spend a lot of time in my room talking to me. I enjoyed those chats very much because she spoke to me as a person, sitting on my bed and taking the time.”
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