Having battled with COVID-19, survivor Brent Teixeira is pleading with the population to take the vaccine.
Diagnosed with the disease in October 2020, during the second wave of infections locally, Teixeira was hospitalised at the Couva Medical and Multi-Training Facility with “severe breathing problems.”
“I couldn’t walk five steps without feeling I ran around the savannah at full hit,” he recounted during yesterday’s Mijnistry of Health virtual media briefing.
“Being able to breathe is something we take for granted and I certainly did.”
He had nothing but praises about his experience at the Couva hospital.
“My mother works at a hospital in Florida that treats COVID patients and being in contact with her – the exact same medicines, procedures and everything (done in Couva) – is exactly the same things that they doing at the hospital in Florida,” he said.
“So I felt confident that I was in the right place with the right doctors and the right medications and everything was going to be taken care of.”
He said one of his worst experiences while hospitalised was when the patient in the bed next to him, with whom he developed a close relationship, died.
“Sadly, he was his mother’s only child and she was a single mother. So we now have a mother that’s left alone with no one to take care of her.”
Teixeira spent a total of 16 days at the facility and for 13 of them, he was on oxygen. He was then sent to the Arima Hospital for treatment of other conditions. However, almost a year later, Teixeira is still suffering the effects of his infection.
“Heart problems, liver, kidney, lungs and pancreas – all were affected by COVID. I now have to live with a lot of these medical problems that I didn’t have before. I still get brain fog. I still have problems with my energy running out after lunch. But I’m alive,” he said.
The first vaccine doses only arrived in this country some four months after his infection, so Teixeira was vulnerable like the rest of the population. Now that doses are available, he is urging people to take them to avoid a fate like his.
“I want to beg my fellow Trinidadians, please go and take the vaccine. I did. My entire family did. From my 15-year-old special needs child to my 89-year-old father-in-law – without any side effects,” he said.
