My Flight From The Corona Virus

As I joyfully cycle down some nondescript rural country lanes in the Chiba Prefecture, two hours east of Tokyo, I look for all the world like I haven't a care in the world. Truth be told, I have really got much at all to worry about. And yet.....

Spain

Just over a year ago, I felt at death's door with the onset of some sort of mystery illness that made me just want to curl up and die. It was an illness that was so, so debilitating I barely made it to the other side of the planet in order to get to the bottom of it. Painful as it was, how little did I know that this was just the beginning of a journey during which I discovered that I had not one, but four plus life-threatening illnesses.

It all began when I went out to perform a concert with my semi-acoustic guitar. That night I took up my customary position sat on a low chair and played the first set of a two-part gig. At the end of that first part, I went to get up for a walk around to stretch my legs, and I discovered to my horror that could not actually get up off the chair. I had no power to raise myself from my hips down. Eventually, by pushing my arms on the seat, with a level of pain I had never before encountered, I was just about able to straighten myself up to a standing position.

Over the following two days, the problem just got worse and worse and spread to all of my joints from my neck down. Realizing that this was pretty serious, not to mention scary, stuff I decided to go to my local health center. As I was to discover to my cost, that was very much easier said than done.

Despite excruciating aches and pains all over my body, the health centre at first simply fobbed me off with a few aspirin saying it was winter aches and pains and getting old. When I went back two days later they refused to treat my condition as serious due to stretched resources because of the Covid pandemic. To make matters worse I was twice threatened by the police with a hefty fine of 600 euros for being out, en-route home from the health center. I was ordered to go home and stay home and told that I was being watched. With nobody at home to help me, I really had no choice but to leave the country where I was living to seek help.

The Corona crisis had kicked in and my plight was a direct consequence of it. I desperately needed to flee as soon as possible. I just wasn’t prepared to be imprisoned in my own home seriously ill with nobody to help me. For all I knew whatever it was that was wrong with me might even kill me. Faced with fight or flight. It was a case of Hobson’s choice.

At the airport, I checked in and went through passport control. My body was racked with pain and exhaustion already ahead of a long-haul flight due to a lack of sleep, in turn, due to the pain I was in, I was not looking forward to it.

As I approached the gate to the plane had to catch I was stopped and told I couldn’t board because the country where I was going to, to catch a connecting flight to my ultimate destination, would only allow their own nationals to land. My heart sank. The journey seemed doomed before it had even begun.

Suddenly another gate official arrived and informed her colleague that I could board if it was simply for a transfer at my first stopover. What a blessed relief. When we landed at the end of the first part of the journey I found the airport almost totally deserted. I couldn’t even get a simple coffee to give me a bit of a boost.

Germany

After two and a half hours of waiting near the boarding gate, I went to reception to get my boarding pass. I was immediately told that since I had set off from my original destination the country I was headed to had also closed its borders to any but its own nationals and that I would not be able to travel any further.

My heart sank deeper and the excruciating pains were getting worse. I could barely walk. After twenty minutes, and an official, inconclusive phone call to my destination country, I was allowed to board, but I was warned I had only an eighty percent chance of being allowed to disembark. I took it. I felt I had no other choice than to take that twenty percent chance of being sent all the way back some eleven thousand kilometers.

Long-haul flights are tiring at the best of times and this one simply exacerbated my worsening condition. The whole flight I was worried sick at the prospect of an immediate return journey. Some eleven and a half hours later, as the plane began to descend, we were informed that it might take us three hours to disembark. Not the news I wanted to hear. My heart began to sink once again.

Japan

Within ten minutes of landing, we were allowed to disembark, but we were immediately sent for a Coronavirus test. After that, we had to line up again to present the papers proving that we had had the test and to be told that we had to go into two weeks quarantine. I was told that I could not go home to my wife’s family house nor use any type of public transport. I was also told that I could not leave the airport for twenty-four hours after I got the test result. I didn’t quite understand the logic of this. If it was a concern that I might have brought with me the virus then sure it made more sense to get me away from the thousands of people in the airport terminal, as far away from there as possible in fact. Then we were sent to yet another queue simply to confirm what we had been told by the previous officials. I had to take a long break from the incessant queuing up.

I then had to go into another line for an immigration interview. They were extremely polite, but they wanted to know everything, who I was, what right I had to be in that country, who was my wife, where was she and could they speak to her to check out my story. At one point they told me I may have to go back from whence I had come. My heart went into sinking mode yet again.

Salvation

Eventually, I was given permission to enter the country. Now all I had to do was pass through the nothing to declare section. My black sense of humor kicked in and I was tempted to tell them that all I had to declare was a mystery illness that was killing me, but I thought better of it. In all, the whole post-landing process had taken six hours. And that was just the beginning!

My wife and I had a very tearful reunion and went for the best coffee I had ever tasted. The problem was, where we were going to stay overnight? There were no hotels or quarantine facilities at the airport at all. The public benches inside the terminal had been designed to prevent anybody from sleeping on them. In the end, we slept in my wife’s car in the car park, if you could call it sleep.

The next day we waited for the test result, but it never came. So my wife booked us into a nearby hotel. By the time we went to bed, it had been seventy-two hours since I had slept at home. I was all done in. After just two days we were asked to leave that hotel to make room for other quarantine travellers and ended up in another far more expensive hotel nearby.

Hell in paradise

In the new hotel, more like a resort and therefore more expensive, we spent three weeks waiting for the result. My wife literally saved my life. Not only was I still in excruciating pain, with some relief from inadequate painkillers, but I was also getting really quite depressed by the whole experience and my crippling condition. The daunting thought crossed my mind that this was how I was going to be for the rest of my life.

We did consider calling emergency services, but my wife was worried about me going into a hospital full of Coronavirus patients and was afraid that, as a vulnerable over sixty-something, I might get the killer disease and come out in a coffin.

For three weeks my wife brought me takeaway food and drinks. She massaged my aching corpse. The dark nocturnal hours were the worst. She even had to help me to the bathroom for my morning constitutionals and to bathe. She was an absolute angel.

For hours on end that whole three weeks of imprisonment, waiting for a result that was never to come whilst we were there, I just sat by the window watching the planes come and go as I tried to hold myself together. I left the room to go down to the hotel gardens for just fifteen minutes a day so the hotel staff could clean the room. It was a living hell in a five-star paradise.

PMR/GCA

I had swollen sensitive temples, which I later discovered is a symptom of a condition called Giant Cell Arthritis. I had pains in my neck, jaw, shoulders, upper arms, lower back, hips, groin, buttocks, thighs, and knees, all at the same time. It was a living torture.

Eventually, tired of waiting for the result, and with credit card maxed out we had to leave. My wife found us a lovely apartment and furnished it alone, and then she found me a health clinic that could treat me. The doctor was a specialist and diagnosed me on sight just from the way I walked into his consulting room and how I struggled to sit and get back up to my feet.

The beginning of the end

I was prescribed a very strong dose of the correct treatment and in a matter of hours began to feel a lot better. However, it took about two weeks to make a full recovery. Eventually, some four weeks after my Coronavirus test I got the test result and I was all clear.

In all I had spent almost five weeks in almost unbearable pain, four of those weeks in quarantine. My condition was thankfully not immediately life-threatening after all, but it was nonetheless incredibly debilitating and I really wouldn’t wish it on my worst enemy.

I am now fully recovered and on treatment for a year. They say the condition could return. I will cross that bridge when I come to it. For now, I am totally pain-free and follow an exercise regime of three to five km a day. I can now move fluidly, even bend to touch my toes, with no discomfort at all.

The condition I suffered is known as PMR, or Polymyalgia Rheumatica, combined with GCA. The condition affects mostly North European women over the age of fifty and is easy to dismiss as simply aches and pains from advancing years. However, when correctly diagnosed via a simple blood test it is highly treatable with steroids. It is just a shame that I had to travel all the way to Japan to get properly treated. I owe the honorable Japanese a very big debt of gratitude. Arigato gosai mas.

Learning to recognize the condition

PMR/GCA is an auto-immune system disease affecting the whole body from the neck down and in severe cases is incredibly painful and debilitating. It is not known with absolute certainty what the exact cause of the condition is, though there are certain indicators to do with lifestyle. It is simply a case of your own auto-immune system attacking you and causing great inflammation of all your joints at the same time. Painkillers only serve to block the pain messages to the brain, they do not deal with the cause of the pain itself. Cortcosteroids deal with the actual inflammation itself and therefore bring great lasting relief. Treatment can last from a year to two years. The condition can return after treatment is finished.

Getting the right diagnosis

If your doctor does not take you seriously enough ask to see another doctor and ask for a proper diagnosis. A simple blood test will let the doctor see if what you have is indeed PMR.

In the process of getting to the bottom of what was wrong with me it was discovered that I had at some time in the recent past had both a silent heart attack and mini stroke. To make matters worse it was discovered that I have two blockages in my carotid artery in my neck and another blockage in a small artery in my heart. I also have sleep apnea and emphysema. I feel truly lucky to be alive.

Postscript

It is now just over a year since my PMR/GCA first kicked in and I am happy to report that it is now in remission and I am off all treatments except a bi-monthly injection of some very expensive drug called Actemera. Hopefully, at my next hospital appointment, I will be told I can stop taking that too. All the other conditions I mentioned are being kept under control with medication, a healthy diet, and exercise.

Looking back I am thankful that it wasn’t Covid, though if it had been it surely could not have been any more painfully debilitating. Ah well, all’s well that ends well.