Healthy mum, 27, haunted by ICU after spending 12 days fighting for life with Covid
A healthy mum-of-two has been left haunted by ICU after she spent 12 days fighting for her life alone in hospital.
Sana Faheem Raja, who in hospital for 12 days, is now urging people to get their vaccines after she battled against Covid.
The 27-year-old, who lives in Prestwich, said she had never had any other health conditions but was worried she wouldn’t make it out of hospital alive.
She says she was left unable to move, eat or drink and her worried husband called 999 at 4am on June 16.
Only days before, her and her two children had tested positive for coronavirus and were self-isolating at home.
She told the Manchester Evening News: “I was having light headiness, I was dizzy, I couldn’t get to the toilet. I wasn’t eating or drinking. I was taken by ambulance to North Manchester General Hospital. I didn’t know I couldn’t breathe but when I got into the back of the ambulance they checked my oxygen levels and they said ‘you can’t breathe, you need oxygen’.
“I was so ill I didn’t even know I couldn’t breathe.”
When she got to the hospital tests revealed that she had a blood clot on her chest, leaving her heart rhythm ‘all over the place’. She also had sepsis.
Three days later, on June 19, she was moved from a Covid ward to ICU in the middle of the night after she was struggling to breathe.
She said: “I’m 27, I’ve never had any other health conditions but I was really worried that I wasn’t going to come out of there alive.
“I remember every single day [on that ward] and it was terrible, honestly.
“There were two people in ICU that they had to take their ventilators off in front of me and I can’t, even now – I’m sitting at home recovering and in my mind I can see it. This is what I want people to know, it’s there. I can’t sleep at night.
“It’s mentally and physically and emotionally drained me out. It has made with withdrawn. I saw two people die in ICU in front of me and it was terrible. It’s awful I just can’t sleep. You’re a curtain away.”
Mrs Raja said she wishes she had the vaccine but at the time was told by her doctors that it wouldn’t work alongside medication she takes for Psoriasis – a skin condition.
She said: “I wish I had the vaccine, I wish I let the Psoriasis carry on and just cope with that because I think the vaccine is more important. I still have a skin condition but I was going to die with Covid.”
Her two children, who are eight and three, are now staying with her mum down south, near Southampton.
She said it was ‘really hard’ to be a mum when she had Covid symptoms but it was even harder because her family are hundreds of miles away.
She added: “My mum has asthma, she had been shielding. She’s not had it this bad.
“You keep thinking the worst as well: Are my oxygen levels going to drop again? Am I going to end up in hospital again? It’s just over and over in my head.”