By Denisia Murat
I was coughing. I was coughing every day. I was coughing every second.
I couldn’t eat. I couldn’t sleep. I couldn’t talk. All I could do was cough.
Covid didn’t start here, in England, until March 2020. The record books will say this. All the newspaper reports will hone in on the March 2020 lockdowns. But my coughing started in November 2019. I was in A&E. There were other people coughing and coughing, just like me.
Fully recovered: Denisia Murat, above, today.
No-one told me I had Covid. I’d never heard that word. But when I did, a few months later, I knew what it meant because I’d had all the symptoms. I had Covid before I even knew what it was.
I survived Covid in 2019 to see it spread across the world and kill thousands of people a year later. This is my story, and I wish it made more sense.
It’s perfectly normal to catch a cold in the winter. I know that. Complaining about minor symptoms such as coughing or fever seems unnecessary. “Don’t be stupid, it’s just a cold,” my family said, as I started coughing in November 2019.
But it wasn’t a cold.
I started to cough all day, every day. It felt like I was coughing every single minute. It felt my lungs might explode at any time. My parents, just like any other parents, gave me numerous cough syrups and paracetamols in a desperate attempt to help me. Nothing worked.
Things got worse. I started to develop a strange fever which lasted for two weeks. My temperature was constantly rising and then falling in an abnormal pattern. But things became serious when I lost my taste.
Clearly, this was more than a cold, more than a stubborn cough.
Firstly, I thought that I had tuberculosis, but they ruled that out. It was something else. Something that even doctors knew nothing about.
One night, I felt like I just couldn’t breathe properly. I was disoriented. That’s when my mum booked a taxi and we went straight to the Leicester Royal Infirmary, Children’s A&E, because at that time I was only 15.
The moment I stepped into the hospital, I knew that something wasn’t right. It was full of babies and young children. They were all coughing violently, struggling to breathe. They all had my symptoms. But physically, I didn’t look like them. They were tiny while I was a 5’10” girl. And, apparently, being tall made you “immune to anything I was later told.
“Oh, you’re a giant, you’re going to be fine,” said the doctor who consulted me (I never saw him again – I was pleased about that) after waiting almost five hours in A&E.
And then he sent me home. Without any medicine. Without any treatment. All because I was “tall and strong” as if, somehow, tall and strong people never died.
I went home – and things got worse.
I came back to A&E a day after. I was pale, nauseous and almost unconscious. I could barely breathe. Fortunately, the staff seemed to be more concerned this time, and I ended up hospitalised for three weeks. It saved my life.
Hospitalised: Denisia Murat in hospital with what she believes was Covid – three months before the UK was in lockdown and before, officially, Covid was present in the UK>
This was the start of a global nightmare which I luckily managed to survive. But I am still thinking about those who didn’t. Those people who lost their lives without realising what killed them.
This was Covid in December 2019. Before anyone had heard of it. It was a horror movie of illness and death that lasted more than two years, killing more than seven million people around the world.
We all know the story.
But was it in Leicester in November 2019? Did I get it before anyone had heard of it?
I’m sure the experts will say I didn’t.
I’m pretty sure I did.
