Gretel Gaffoglio
05/24/2020 - 7:00
- Clarín.com
- Society
On February 12, industrial designer Marcos Lanari (34) traveled alone to Switzerland with the intention of getting a job and then settling in that country with his wife and four-year-old twin daughters. Lausanne, the chosen city where his brother lives, is 50 kilometers from Geneva and only three hours from Lombardy, the main focus of the spread of coronavirus in Europe.
The pandemic was advancing relentlessly around the world as Marco searched in vain for work . Switzerland began a voluntary quarantine that was carried out as if it were mandatory. The borders of the world and that of Argentina began to close. You had to come back anyway. Marco put a lot of effort and was lucky to get a single flight that made a stop of 12 hours and change planes with another that came from Thailand. He did not hesitate, bought the ticket, put on a chinstrap and tackled it.
He arrived in Ezeiza on March 23. Immediately, all those who came on their flight were separated to comply with the mandatory isolation in hotels . On the one hand, residents of Capital, on the other, residents of the province. Marco got the Regente Hotel in the city center.
Two days later, symptoms broke out. Back pain, headache and a kind of low-grade fever. It would be from lying so long, he thought. But the symptoms worsened and the dry cough appeared. On the fifth day Marco reached 38º fever. There the protocol was activated.
Of all the passengers quarantined at the hotel, Marco was the only one with coronavirus symptoms. “They called me down to the lobby and everyone was looking at me with fear. They put me in light blue camisoles as if I had leprosy, ”recalls Marco, who by then was one of the first infected in the country and the doctors knew little and nothing about the disease.
He got into the ambulance alone. He caught a glimpse of a beautiful sunset fading into a ghost town. He began to walk through a deserted city. He was scared and feared for what was to come: nobody knew how to treat what he had .
He arrived at the guard of a clinic in Santa Fe and Pueyrredón. They immediately isolated him and did a CT scan and a swab. Three days he spent alone in that office box trembling and waiting for the swab result. The test was negative. Marco was a false negative. He had all the symptoms of a coronavirus patient and a high fever. They decided to transfer him to the Agote Sanatorium. From there, the situation went from bad to worse.
Ten days he was hospitalized and isolated in a room without receiving a visit from any family member. “You value the touch of a forearm when the nurses inadvertently change your serum. They are key in all this. I felt very bad and very lonely ”, remembers Marco.
Doctors came to see him only once a day and communicated with him by phone. Marco had to take the fever and check the blood oxygen saturation with the oximeter. The entire protocol of dressing to enter the room and then hygiene and washing on leaving took a long time, so they minimized income and were only strictly necessary.
“I rode the Covid-19 in a very harsh way. In the Agote I spent 5 days in intermediate therapy and 5 days in intensive therapy . What I suffered the most was an excruciating fever, which was not like what we normally have. Despite being super warm, he could not regulate his body temperature. My body trembled non-stop. Everything, until I took acetaminophen and the fever started to go down. But then it went up again, ”he says.
Marco says that nobody knew how to treat the disease. As pain or a new symptom presented, they gave him medicine to counteract it. Thus he was filling with remedies until his liver and kidneys were with dangerous parameters for his health .
A new CT scan revealed that he had pneumonia and a leaking left lung. Although blood oxygen saturation remained at normal levels, fever and cough worsened. He had no appetite and from so much cough he no longer had a bite.
At first they gave him antibiotics: levofloxacin by blood, remedies for diarrhea, nausea, and blood thinners. And then all kinds of medications: the highly controversial hydroxychloroquine, the combination of lopinavir and ritonavir, codeine, plus paracetamol. So many that his liver and kidneys began to suffer.
In an audio from intensive therapy that Marco sent to his family and that he shares with Clarín , he is heard broken: “I am without a job, without health, without anyone knowing how to cure this disease. This is a nightmare that does not end. I am mentally detonated . "
“At one point I hit rock bottom, and although I am not posting much on social networks, I put a comment and the displays of affection, affection, and good energy I received gave me vital energy . The support of people helps you feel better and that makes your body recover, "he says now.
After two days had passed and she no longer had a fever, she was discharged from the hospital to continue the mandatory quarantine at her mother's home, away from her twin daughters.
The protocol establishes that 21 days of isolation should be performed from the first swab. He had 12 more days.
He lost a lot of weight and muscle because he was bedridden for so long. First in a hospital and then in his mother's apartment, which he divided in two to avoid all kinds of contact.
But complying with the isolation, a fever appeared again. They ordered a new hospitalization in the Agote. The tomography revealed that he had taken the right lung with leaks. However, to the physicians' bewilderment , blood oxygen saturation was fine.
They did a second swab and the result was negative again. With that negative, even though he still had a cough and was weak, he was discharged.
“I knew that when I finally got home I would be born again. It had been 37 days since I left Switzerland and counting the time that I was looking for a job more than two months ago that I did not see my wife and daughters, ”he says. And he continues: “Health, family and affections are the pillars of life. If you lack one you fall. The issue of how your head works is key, since after three days of being with my wife and daughters, the recovery was exponential. ”
He returned home on April 28. It was raining, from the excitement I could hardly put the keys in the lock. He had already arranged with his wife that she and the twins would be watching a movie, so that when Marco arrived, he could take a bath and comply with all the cleaning protocol. When he came out of the bathroom, he opened the door to the room and with a wide smile in front of the twins he exclaimed: "I arrived."
