'It was like a truck on my chest' - Woman recalls Covid-19 illness when dictating will on Whatsapp
A Dublin woman who had coronavirus says she dictated a will in a WhatsApp voice message on the way to a 13-day hospital stint.
Yvonne Kinsella is a journalist and TV producer who has asthma and an autoimmune disease. Her husband also has asthma.
She lives at home with her husband, her daughter, the daughter's partner and their two young children - the couple are saving for a house.
The entire family turned out to be positive for the coronavirus.
But she told Pat Kenny on Newstalk radio today: "Thankfully we're now finally on the road to recovery.
"My husband starting feeling a little sick first and he slept on the sofa the night that kind of everything went upside down for me.
"And then I got very, very sick and then unfortunately the whole household were tested and we're all positive."
They didn't test the babies cause they were too young, but the babies had and one of them still has it, a Covid cough. It's not like any other cough, you can tell straight away what it is.
She spoke about her ordeal: "The week of March 23rd is when it all kicked off for me.
"The week before that we had all had some sort of a 'bug', which I now realise the vomiting was actually a build up to what was happening.
"Monday I had indigestion...and I thought this was unusual, but I didn't think much of it - maybe because I was sick the previous week.
"And then by the Wednesday - Wednesday was a tough day.
"On the Wednesday I got this feeling, I couldn't speak and it was like a truck had parked on my chest - that's possibly the only way of describing it.
"That morning I couldn't catch my breath, I couldn't speak - and then it went.
"But by the afternoon my energy had dropped so I went to bed".
She said she was having hot flushes and spells of being freezing cold in the bed along with an "indescribable" headache.
The pain went through my body, I couldn't actually get out of bed to walk a few feet to the en-suite.
She resisted calling an ambulance until next night.
She said: "On Thursday night I woke up at about three o'clock and I remember lying in the bed going 'I'm dying here'.
"The breathing was very shallow, I hadn't the energy to even turn in the bed".
"I remember thinking 'If I'm going to die tonight I don't want the kids to wake up, I don't want anyone to hear me going.
"I just went down the stairs and I said to my husband 'get me to the hospital now love'.
She then went about writing a will: "I had said to John 'go out to the kitchen' - we had bought wills about two years ago but we never wrote them.
"He gave me a pen and I hadn't even the energy to do anything - so I just signed it and I put the date on it.
"He drove me to the hospital and as we drove I dictated the will into a WhatsApp voice message.
"And I just said to him 'go home and before you go to bed I want you to write it up so it's a viable will'".
She said she did not want her husband to come into the hospital, as it was for coronavirus patients only.
"I walked in and I purposely didn't look back at him cause I was struggling to walk and I couldn't breathe properly - and I thought if I cry, I'll make myself worse."
She said a doctor told her: "You may have left it longer than you should have, but you were right to come in."
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