Elsa who is Spanish, was admitted to a hospital in Madrid during the peak of the first wave of corona with covid-19 in April last year. At that time she was unaware she would remain there for the next ten months. Half of that time in intensive care.
53-year-old Elsa leaves hospital after 315 days to applause from healthcare staff
Last Monday, the months-long hospitalisation came to an end. And on Tuesday she could celebrate her 53rd birthday at home, in her own environment with her family. “In September I realised that months had passed, summer was over and my daughter’s school year had already ended. I realised my family must have had a very difficult time, ”says an emotional Elsa just before she leaves the hospital.
Elsa has lymphoma and was hospitalised with severe symptoms when she became infected with the coronavirus in the spring. After two weeks of hospitalisation, she was transferred to intensive care where she received artificial respiration. She escaped death several times; in the ten months that she was in hospital, she developed a cerebral infarction and various infections. But in the end her health gradually improved.
“Insanely excited to go home”
“With Elsa, about everything that can go wrong with a patient went wrong. For her, the past months seem like a lost year, but in reality she has won a life, ”says her doctor María Eugenia García Leonis of the Hospital Gregorio Marañón. So that new life started last Monday when she and her family were allowed to go home together, which she said she was “really looking forward to“
Aftercare
More than 300 health professionals have been directly involved in providing medical care for Elsa throughout the past ten months. As much as she wants to go home, it will take her some time to get used to without all this professional help. She is therefore not a 100% better, recovery will take a long time. Covid-10 and all the complications left in the hospital leave lasting traces that will change Elsa’s life forever.
The Hospital Gregorio Marañón offers multidisciplinary aftercare to all covid patients who are discharged from intensive care.
Elsa left the hospital last Monday to the applause of health workers who cared for her for nearly a year.
