Sarah Davidson* woke up on the Covid ward at Bolton Royal hospital in March to find she had been turned on to her belly. She had watched enough news reports to know what that meant. “The nurse from the critical care team turned up and said: ‘It’s for your lungs, your breathing stopped’. They pronged me for days and days. I was like a rotisserie chicken,” she said.
“The person in the next bed died. I thought people would be dying upstairs on intensive care, but they were dying around me on the Covid ward,” she said, explaining why she had been diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) at Bolton’s long Covid clinic. “I have this habit now, I wake at about 4am and I think, you know what, I’m alive. I’ll stay awake, I’m not going to go back to sleep: why push it?”
The 57-year-old teaching assistant is one of 285 patients undergoing extensive therapy for long Covid in Bolton, one of the local authorities hardest hit by coronavirus in the UK. Almost 40,000 people in the Greater Manchester town have tested positive for Covid over the pandemic, just…
