He can bring the sound back to mind if he wants to. Effortless. All those beeps, beeps. All that ticking. Buzz. “Maddening, all those devices,” he says. “Really continuously, huh, all the time. I didn’t close my eye. But yes. In an intensive care unit you don’t sleep, either. Keeping you alive, that’s the only priority there.”
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Kees-Jan Bus (58) from Bakkum, father of three daughters and one son, was as fit as a fiddle. He cycled 70 kilometers per ride, walked a lot, worked full-time as an interim manager.
No obesity, no medical history, no health problems – no dirt in the air. And yet he and his family ended up in a ‘really bad movie’.
Fair
“And I think,” he says on the phone, “that that’s why I tell my story. But it has to be an honest story, not a sensational one. Agreed?”
Agreed.
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“I just want to show you how this virus can suddenly catch you. It doesn’t look at your age, condition. Young, healthy people think they are immortal. I was also young, and healthy, but not immortal. The IC doctor said afterwards: Mr. Bus, that was in the nick of time. Corona is a very bad lottery ticket. It can wreck you. “
Jobs in Italy
It starts February 21, when Kees-Jan flies to Italy with a few friends he has known for a long time to ‘do odd jobs’ in a house of one of his best friends. “We have been doing this for years, and it is actually a nice license to drink nice wine and eat extensively in the Italian sun, in that beautiful environment.”
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After a ‘wonderful week’, the friends return home on February 29 rested. It doesn’t start until seven days later, March 5. At least, with Kees-Jan, the rest is not bothered by anything. But Kees-Jan gets a sore throat, a ‘rickety feeling’, muscle pain and also a fever. “I struggled on for a few days, until suddenly I had a fever of 40.4 degrees on Monday.”
He calls the doctor. “But the corona panic was not really present in our country at the time, and certainly not in our province. So I was told that I just had to get out. Moreover, I had been in Italy, but not at risk and did not cough, and that was a well-known symptom of corona. “
No more urination
So yes, the word goes through his mind, but no, there are no real concerns. Until the fever lasts for a week. Kees-Jan is getting worse sleep, loses weight, has difficulty urinating. And then suddenly, besides a fever, there is also something else in the Bus house: despair.
And now I’m fed up, says his wife. She calls the GP, and before they know it, a doctor in a protective suit is in the living room. “As in a movie,” says Kees-Jan again. And he also knows what he was thinking. Fúck, it can sometimes be really corona.
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The doctor listens to his lungs and puts her stethoscope back down within a minute. She suspects severe pneumonia, an extremely low oxygen percentage in the blood, his kidneys no longer function properly.
In short: all kinds of alarm bells are ringing, Kees-Jan has to go to the hospital immediately, his 19-year-old son Floris takes him to the hospital of the Noordwest Hospital Group in Alkmaar. Kees-Jans wife and daughter cannot come along. They also feel very bad now – complaints that look a lot like corona.
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A lung photo is taken in the hospital. He receives extra oxygen and tests are carried out. “Then we no longer doubted what the result would be. I was already alone in the lung department, in a room that normally fit six people.”
That room is closed with a kind of lock. “Then you know what time it is.”
“You do indeed have corona”
Not much later comes the result: corona. This means that Kees-Jan’s wife and daughter are also very likely. And Floris has already had it – she has only been a bit flu-like for a few days.
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Kees-Jan is in the lung department for two days – or are there three? “I was really confused, and I still lose pieces.” Two days, his wife says when he asks about it. Two days lung department, where he gets antibiotics and oxygen, and then things go wrong. Panic: Kees-Jan no longer has an increase, but an extreme decrease: 35 degrees. That’s when Kees-Jan’s son, Floris, sees the fear in his father’s eyes. And also breaks itself.
Life threatening
“The doctors had put the word ‘life-threatening’ in their mouth. They rushed me down the corridors to the ICU, and Floris was on his own at the time and didn’t know if he would see his father alive again.”
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“I remember when I gasped for air into the IC, through the locks. The staff all looked the same. Several things were connected to each arm. A blood pressure monitor, an IV for moisture. Plaques for the ECG on your chest There was a wall of appliances behind me. “
He looks at his own arms and chest, sees his own heartbeat on a screen and thinks: now I am at the mercy of the gods.
All corona
Kees-Jan laughs grimly when he thinks about it. “They told my son that his father was the first corona patient here on the ic with corona.”
But Kees-Jan is not alone for long. “I saw a bed drive three times with seriously ill patients. They were all lying on their stomachs. All corona. All on the ventilator. Then I realized that I was still quite lucky: I received extra oxygen, but I did not have to on the ventilator and had to sit upright. “
What makes him remember that department – “the most annoying place I’ve ever been”?
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Just like an aquarium
All patients lie behind a kind of glass wall. Six IC beds in a row. “And behind that glass, the medical staff is continuously monitoring you. As if they were in an aquarium. There is really fighting, by both the patients and the staff. And when you press a button, they have to put their entire suit back on. , masks for, to help you. Really: those doctors and nurses spend all day dressing, caring, undressing. Dressing, caring, undressing. “
He later felt guilty about that. “Then all I needed was a glass of water, and someone had to be completely hoisted into such a suit again.”
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Because of the risk of infection, no one is allowed to join him. “I actually found that the most annoying for my family. You know, I was there, I was the direct object, and I just thought: hurry up with all those squeaky and buzzing tools, please make me better as soon as possible. “
“But in the family room my son was on his own, who no longer pulled it. My two daughters and their partners took care of him, but my wife and other daughter were at home. Sick on the couch, waiting for news. And that illness is so erratic, so unpredictable. Not possible, actually. “
Far from finished living
“It was inhumane,” said Kees-Jan’s wife in the background of the phone call. “Yes. Inhuman,” Kees-Jan repeats. Whether he himself thought of death? “It goes through your head, yes. And then I also thought: but I am far from finished with life!”
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And he felt a “leper”. “That may be a big word, but it feels very strange that you cannot have physical contact.” Incidentally, that feeling is still there, even now that he has been home for a week. He spent a total of seven days in hospital and three days on ICU.
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Only 40 corona patients are discharged from IC
The figures about the number of Dutch patients in intensive care are changing per minute. At the publication of this article, 40 corona patients were discharged from the IC.
1127 corona patients are on the ICU for treatment. 168 people died on the ICU as a result of the virus.
Source: NICE Foundation
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Overjoyed, but also afraid
“Family and close friends are delighted to see me, but keep a good distance. More than one and a half meters. As much as five meters. I would need more clarity. When are you officially healthy and no longer contagious?”
“Anyway. I understand that fear. Don’t blame anyone. Nobody wants to get sick, and my environment has recognized that everyone can get it.”
“There are still plenty of people in the Netherlands who think they can’t get it. Well, I have news for those people: I got it, and I was also young and healthy.”
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Kees-Jan has crawled through the proverbial eye of the needle. “I recovered pretty quickly, needed less and less oxygen. I remember how I got rid of the IC after a few days and said to the nurses, “Can you drive a little slow?”
Experience consciously
“I wanted to experience this moment consciously. I was taken to the IC with a rotten speed, which was intense, but now I was on the mend and I could look at the artworks hanging on the wall of the hallway. And yes, I I cried. You should know that. “
He was taken back to the room where he initially entered, in the lung ward. “There was a stack of 15 centimeters high, all cards in front of me. I watched them at my leisure, hung them up. All those sweet words. That was really a euphoric moment, leaving ic and resting in a normal hospital room.”
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Now, when he sees images on the news of a full IC at home on the couch, he zaps away. “I don’t want to see it. I have seen people walking around desperately, like: what’s going on here? It is really not a department to be happy with. People hang between life and death. “
It is not without reason that Kees-Jan had two conversations with the hospital psychologist about what happened. To process it a bit. And at the same time I am very grateful that the IC is there and all those top people in health care. What can they fight, say. Thanks to them I recovered. “
Where have my muscles gone?
Not that he’s all the old. “I just sat on the couch and thought, yes, where have my muscles actually gone?” But together with his wife – who is also in better shape – he takes walks First through the garden, a hundred meters, two hundred meters, now outside He has even cycled again Not the 70 kilometers he normally does, only 30.
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“But I can’t complain. I enjoy the nice weather extra, a bike ride, a walk, eating together, the children, supporters, and our grandson. I heard the news yesterday that only then 20 people left the ICU alive after they had corona. Only 20! Then we looked at each other for a moment: one of them is just me. “
A movie. It was a movie. A bad movie, but with a good ending.
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