It's a big question.
As for patients who present with it, there are several different types of presentations. What is one person's experience isn't necessarily the experience of everyone.
The patients I see unfortunately are the sickest of the sick. When they come in, many of them are struggling to breathe. There's also the fear and anxiety just with the syndrome itself, and all the hype that's been around it. Certainly, the caring that the nurses have demonstrated has been fantastic.
The one aspect that patients are experiencing that unfortunately makes them unique compared to any other disease and disorder is there are no friends or family that are around them. I think that is a tragedy of this situation that we'll be talking about for years from now. We have done our best, at least in the Ottawa Hospital, to provide means, such as videos, to permit them to see the people they really want to see. Someone touching them and holding them who's not their family is certainly better than no one, but I don't think it's the same.
In answer to how they experience...they feel short of breath. Some of them are struggling to breathe, and others, surprisingly enough, aren't struggling, albeit that the oxygen levels in their blood that we measure are quite low.
As for the recovery, certainly I know my rehab colleagues are doing their best to accommodate this. There certainly are a lot of unknowns that have been alluded to, such as whether or not people are actually infectious. They are doing their best to rehab these individuals. Some of them are staying on ventilators for almost a month, so you can imagine how much muscle...and the changes they have experienced.