76-year-old Thorold resident Leslie Daniels has been through the wringer.
Last summer — just a few weeks after her 16-year-old grandson passed away in a tragic accident — she contracted COVID-19 and ended up in a medically induced coma.
“I asked the doctor when I was leaving, after everything I went through, how come I got COVID so bad? And he said, ‘Well, part of it is stress that would cause for this to happen,'” remembers Daniels, in an interview with ThoroldToday.
Daniels — who has a history of diabetes — had never contracted the respiratory disease before and she says she was up to date on all her COVID vaccinations. But in early August 2024, she fell ill after a shopping trip to Costco with a friend.
At first, she thought she would be fine.
“But the third day, I was so bad, and I said to [my husband] Alan, ‘You need to call the ambulance,’” says Daniels. “So they called the ambulance, I went in. By that time I was basically screaming with pain, I was just beside myself and I had to sit in the hallway. They finally came up to me and asked, ‘Would you accept a medicated coma and be on the ventilator?’ And I said, ‘Do whatever you can.’”
Daniels said she never had any hesitation about going into a coma, as she used to be a nurse and she knew her chances of survival would be greater.
“A lot of people are more afraid of the cure because they're gonna be put unconscious and they're gonna have something stuck down their throat and be on a ventilator — they don't understand that,” says Daniels. “I'd be dead if they had not done what they did.”
Between August and September, Daniels drifted between life and the death in the ICU ward.
“[The coma] doesn't allow you to go into deep enough sleep that your brain relaxes,” explains Daniels. “So you’re just lying there.”
Daniels has vivid memories of what happened while she was in a coma, but she found out later that those memories didn’t always match reality.
“I wanted out of there so bad,” she remembers. “So to my son, when he came to visit, I asked, ‘Do you have wire cutters?’ And he said, ‘Yes, in my trunk.’ So in my delusion, he went and got them for me. And I went out one of the doors from the hospital, and I cut some wire that was keeping me from getting to the road to get out. Like, it was clear in my mind. They came and got me, brought me back and sat me in a chair, tied my hands down. And there was something in front of me that kept hitting me in the face. And I couldn't get it away from me because my hands were tied on either side of me.”
What actually happened is that Daniels hands were tied down because, she was trying to take the oxygen-meter out of her nose.
“I kept playing with it, trying to get it out — so they tied my hands down,” explains Daniels. “But in my mind, I was certain that they had done that as punishment because I had found my way out of the hospital.”
Daniels says the experiences she had while in a coma feel so vivid that she can’t describe them as dreams.
“There's a difference between dreams and delusions,” she says.
One day mid-September, Daniels woke up after doctors removed the ventilator and she was able to breathe on her own again.
“One of the head nurses that was taking care of me came in and asked, ‘Do you know what day it is?’ And I said, ‘No.’ He asked, ‘Do you know where you are? Do you know why you're here?’ I said, ‘Yes.’ I had to try to tell him I couldn't talk because after having the ventilator for that length of time, I couldn't talk at all.”
Daniels feels lucky because, even though she had been in a coma for almost a month, she was still in relatively good shape — although she had to re-learn how to do everything.
“The physio came in one morning and they gave me a walker, and I walked out the door and went all the way around this huge ICU and back to my room,” she recalls. “When we got back to the room, one turns to the other one and said, ‘There's no way that she needs to go to the medical floor.’ The doctor came in and he said,’You'll recover better at home.’"
Daniels has been at home ever since, and while she’s getting back to how she was before the ordeal — she still feels very tired.
“The only thing I'm not doing now is driving,” Daniels says. “And that's because I have a limit. I get exhausted. It has to do with COVID. The recovery period is a long period.”
That’s why Daniels wants to issue an important reminder to other people in the community: COVID-19 is still out there.
“When there is an increase in the numbers of COVID — it’s easy to find online — start wearing a mask again and be extra cautious,” she says. “Because there are a lot of people out there that think it's just gone away.”
While Daniels is slowly getting back to her normal routine, the disease has put a real dent in her social life.
In her absence, she has had to give up her membership of the Thorold Garden Club — which she was the president of for over a decade.
Now, she is focusing her efforts on the city’s Age-Friendly Committee, where she is starting a new garden initiative: ‘Growing Together’.
“It's about gardening but it's also about the collective,” Daniels says. “We're going to do a lot of garden therapy for seniors but it could be anything.”
On Feb. 8, the committee is putting on a Seedy Saturday event at the Thorold 50+ Centre.
The event will serve as a sort of coming out for Daniels.
“My kids were so traumatized,” she says. “They were worried every time the phone rang. They are still like that when I do anything but I can't be stuck here by myself for the rest of my life. I know I'm ready to come back out.”
