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“You feel it on your lips and all of your skin, even with your eyes,” says Marco Colombo, of the oxygen pulsing through a mask that kept him alive.
“When you’re wearing an oxygen mask for a few days, you get used to it. There’s this fresh feeling on your face, it’s almost pleasant.”
With these words, the Italian politician attempts to give a snapshot of the first few days of being hospitalized which is no easy task.
Colombo said, “When you’re in the ICU [Intensive Care Unit], your senses are altered, mashed up, and your whole spirit drawn into a singular effort: staying alive.”
After coping with a breathing tube and artificial ventilation for two weeks, Colombo was determined: “I have to do it autonomously again.” And so he woke up the next morning and began to slowly reduce the amount of time on the machine. “I began by removing the mask for two hours, then three, and so on. After a couple of days, I was able to use it just for a few minutes here and there.”
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Colombo is a well-known politician in Varese, a city north of Milan, in the region of Lombardy. He’s young, a man of 45, and in good health. Colombo said, “I’ve always been an active human being. I used to run a big company in the electrical field, and I was also a council member.”
Indeed, he has been sitting in the regional parliament for two years now. Before that, Colombo was for nine years the mayor of Sesto Calende, a small town in Varese province with 11,000 inhabitants. But, Colombo, a tall, brawny man, has been under attack from an “invisible enemy.”
“When I took my temperature for the first time,” he said, “I immediately had a sense of what was going on. After two days of isolating at home, the fatigue became unbearable.” He realized that he had to ask for help, and so went to the hospital to get tested.
“Positive for coronavirus,” the doctors said.
Lombardy, the region where Colombo lives, has become the epicenter of the coronavirus pandemic in Italy. All of the great historical Italian cities are now ghost towns. In Bergamo, which is in the same region, the saddest possible scene has been witnessed: a long queue of military vehicles ushering coffins outside the city. Cemeteries are out of room, and even the crematoriums are under strain.
This plague has already taken the lives of more than 8,000 people in Italy, not only of older folks, although they are indeed the most vulnerable part of the population, but also young people, who never expected to be hit by the illness. Not even the public health service was fully prepared to face such a catastrophe, as evidenced by Colombo’s account of his own experience: “When the ambulance technicians came to pick me up at home, they took about half-an-hour to put on their protective suits, masks and gloves; they were still not used to that.”
In the following days, Varese’s hospital was totally converted into a ‘COVID clinic,’ and Colombo was able to watch the transformation live. He said, “I was stuck in the emergency for 70 hours. Nights in the hospital are never silent. I could hear doctors’ and nurses’ voices, caught up in the frenetic activity of setting up new wards with beds and breathing machines.” All those spaces would soon be occupied by patients. “At night, I tried to help my roommate, Renato, an older man in his 70s, do simple things like drink water.”
Colombo did so with kindness and self-sacrifice. But the last few days before leaving the hospital something changed, he admitted: “When my second and final test came back negative, I was afraid of getting infected again.”
Now Colombo is back home in Sesto Calende with his family — a wife and three daughters. He is also back at work, as well as engaged in his political activity. “As I get up in the morning, I’m still short of breath,” he said.
Read: British Prime Minister Boris Johnson becomes first world leader to test positive for coronavirus
He can now make jokes about the adjective ‘positive’: “I’ve always been a ‘positive’ and pro-active person, I couldn’t contradict myself this time, so I came up ‘positive’ also when I got COVID-tested.”
When asked what he found really helpful during the seemingly never-ending hours in the hospital, Colombo, who is part of Lega, a populist right-wing party that currently runs the region of Lombardy, replied: “I thought about Lombardy’s landscape and people. I thought about projects which could be introduced in order to change our health services.”
“We have to concentrate on improving services and focusing on social and civil rights. We won’t forget countries who are sending doctors and medicine, such as Cuba, Russia and Venezuela.”
Read: Cuban, Russian and Chinese efforts to assist Lombardy
