I feel extremely lucky to have come out with minimal after effects. I have some memory loss and get confused easily, I have a sore throat which has lasted a couple of weeks (I suspect this is due to being intubated) and a very sore back which is easing day by day.
The symptoms I had were feeling as if I had the onset of flu, with a slight fever. I didn't (as far as I recall) have a severe headache or an aversion to light, but my wife tells me I went to bed early the day before, complaining of feeling very run down and that the day of the collapse she had to help me dress. I only recall bits and pieces of the Monday/Tuesday.
When in ICU and under the induced coma I had some very strange, horrid hallucinations, due to the morphine and other medication they had given me. But as they brought me out of the coma I started to get back into the real world, though I did manage to confuse what one nurse told me when she gave me a load of tablets to take and I swear she told me to put eight small tablets in my ears, which I mulled over for a good 10 minutes. But as I'd been such a fractious patient whilst there and had now decided to turn over a new leaf, I didn't question her and did place four tablets in each ear, only for her to return some time later and ask me why I had tablets in my ears!
Four weeks on, I am on six tablets a day – rest assured taken orally and not in my ears – still feel a bit unsteady and confused at times but once my back pain has gone, which it is doing, slowly, and the sore throat is sorted out I should be back to full health (fingers crossed!).
John Wood
June 2012