Story By: Alex Cope, Sub Editor: Joseph Golder, Agency: Central European News
This 31-year-old Kurdish-American nurse has said she felt like she was “choking” during her “miserable” battle with coronavirus despite having no underlying conditions.
Akhink Omer, who lives in Tennessee, in the United States, was diagnosed with COVID-19 on 19th March and ended up staying in the hospital for eight days despite being “a healthy young person”.
She has now warned other “non-vulnerable” people not to take the virus lightly, saying the symptoms were “miserable”.
Speaking to Kurdish media outlet Rudaw, she said: “Definitely the worst part of COVID-19 is not being able to take a deep breath. While I was a patient all I wanted to do is to take a deep breath.
“The coughing is by far the worst symptom of COVID-19, because I would cough so much that I felt like I was choking, and that was the scariest part and most difficult.”
Speaking about how she developed symptoms she said that on 8th March “ I was completely fine. I even went to the gym and wasn’t short of breath.
“From the very beginning, I did not think I had COVID-19. I thought maybe I had picked up some sort of bacterial infection, so I figured a couple days of antibiotics would make me feel better.”
However, she did not receive a test until 16th March when she went to an emergency ward and her symptoms became severe. Speaking to Kurdistan 24, she said: “I had a pounding headache, fever and chills, body aches, a dry cough that would not stop. I would get extremely exhausted just walking from my room to the bathroom.”
She was then admitted to hospital and the nurse said: “You have body aches, and when people ask what hurts the most, I always respond saying ‘everything, from head to toe hurts.”
Writing on social media, Omer said: “If you take anything away from this thread it’s stay home and don’t unnecessarily expose others. Throughout this whole process the thing I kept repeating is ‘I don’t know how an elderly person would handle this.’ Because when it’s bad it’s really bad.”
She said that the lack of testing in the United States is “causing uncertainty and panic”, adding that the availability of testing is “a matter of life or death”.
The nurse has now fully recovered and wrote on social media on 11th April that she was ” heading to Boston to work on a #Covid19 unit”.
According to the latest figures from the Johns Hopkins University, the United States has suffered 582,594 confirmed cases of COVID-19 with 23,649 deaths.
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