By Dr Ajit Saxena

I flipped through the CT scan images. The first set showed a patch on the lungs. The second set of images, taken a week later was scarier. The infection had taken over the entire lungs. This is how coronavirus works. Doctors are learning more about the virus everyday and what it can do to your lungs. I am a surgeon. I specialise in the diseases of the urinary tract and male reproductive system. Over the last four decades, I have examined scores of CT scans in the hope of finding the best treatment plan for my patients. But this scan was different. It was my own.

I wasn’t at the urology suite, wearing my green hospital smock ready for surgery. I was dressed in a patient’s gown, confined to bed and surrounded by PPE suite wearing nurses and housekeeping staff—the only humans I would get to see for the next 20 days, other the one’s  on the television, which I occasionally switched on to break the tedium and to distract my mind.

The CT scans were taken during the initial weeks of my admission. But they were given to me only after my body started showing definite signs of recovery, because my colleagues feared that it would worsen my situation. 

Of course, they had reasons to worry. I am 65 and a diabetic, a vulnerable category for whom the severity of Covid-19 is tripled, according to research.

About a month ago, I was among the frontline health workers who got vaccinated for the disease at my hospital. 10 days later I developed fever.

Initially, the symptoms were so mild that I thought it must be the routine fatigue I experience after a tiring day at work. Then a few days later I began to experience muscular pain, but again nothing alarming, so I ignored. I shouldn’t have done that. Because by the time I realised there was something seriously wrong with my body, I was so exhausted to take even the Covid-19 test that I was hospitalised.