On August 9, a Sunday, Aditi Mitra decided to prepare mutton do pyaza , a favourite of her son, for lunch. After a labourious process that detained her in the kitchen for better part of the morning, the dish came out looking good. But there was a problem: she couldn’t smell it.
Ms. Mitra then rushed to the dressing table and picked up one of her perfumes, called Dune, and held it close to her nose. She couldn’t smell it either. The following morning, all three living in the house — Ms. Mitra (50), her son (15) and her father-in-law (88) — showed up at the Peerless Hospital to test for COVID-19. The fact that she is an administrator at the hospital — that is how she got the virus — was of big help.
The results came in the evening: she was COVID-19 positive, while her son and father-in-law tested negative. She immediately got herself admitted — she was to be cut off from the rest of the world for 14 days. “Initially, the loss of smell was the only symptom. But soon after I got admitted, I developed difficulty in breathing and also diarrhoea,” Ms. Mitra told The Hindu .
During the first few days at the hospital, whose corridors she knew like the back of her hand but where she now lay confined in a private ward, she wondered whether she would ever see her son again. The gloom stemmed from the fact that she had seen several COVID-19 patients die in her hospital: men from the corporation came and collected the bodies, which the loved ones never got to see. And until just the other day, she had been personally dealing with two high-profile COVID-19 patients, Communist Party of India (Marxist) veteran Shyamal Chakraborty and businessman Shankar Sen. The two elderly men had been quite jovial while in the hospital and it had looked like they would pull through. Their sudden deaths had left her shaken.
“Since my ward overlooked a road, I would ask my driver to bring my son there and I would wave at him from the window. For 14 days, I could only wave at him from the window,” Ms. Mitra said.
All that she was given during her stay in the hospital was inhalers, cough syrup, Vitamin C and tablets containing a dose of zinc. “Once the diarrhoea subsided, I started spot-jogging and breathing exercises. Friends were calling me and sending videos all the time to cheer me up,” she said.
Her two takeaways from the hospitalisation, she said, was that one should not panic if diagnosed with COVID-19 and that one should lead a healthy lifestyle even post-treatment because the virus is capable of affecting all the organs of the body.
“I told all my friends and relatives that I was in hospital because of COVID-19. I didn’t hide it. As a result, today many of them are reaching out to me for advice on isolation, and I am only happy to help,” Ms. Mitra said.
She added, “My biggest worry was how my neighbours would behave. A doctor colleague of mine who had tested positive had had a very bad experience. He not only suffered harassment at the hand of police and corporation officials but also had neighbours shutting their doors and windows on his face. Fortunately, none of my neighbours even realised that I was in hospital.”
