Coronavirus: 'My three-week battle in three hospitals'

The clapping and whooping of three small boys surrounding their dad, who is in a wheelchair, has been viewed thousands of times on social media.

Standing outside their home, they're supporting healthcare workers.

Jack McCullough has reason to applaud with his sons.

In the video he is wrapped up against the cold and looks weak. He's just spent three weeks in hospital recovering from Covid-19 in three different hospitals.

It's taking much longer than he expected.

Mr McCullough, from Dromore in County Down, works mostly at home in the IT industry.

He's been posting his thanks to every medical team he knows took care of him in Craigavon, the Mater Hospital and the Nightingale Hospital at Belfast City .

In another video, posted on the Southern Health Trust's facebook page, Jack recounted his experience from when he was admitted to hospital on Mother's Day.

When I meet him, socially-distanced in his back garden almost six weeks later, he's still weak.

"Even now I go for a short walk and I'm completely exhausted," he explained.

"I did lose about two stone in hospital, unfortunately not as much off my stomach as I would have liked.

"That was mostly muscle mass, so I need to start really trying to build all that up again."

Mr McCullough started feeling ill in March and spent 10 days isolating in his home office, separate from his wife, mother-in-law, and three young sons.

His condition worsened and when he had trouble breathing, was finally admitted to Craigavon hospital where the staff quickly moved him to ICU.

"So I phoned my wife," he told me.

"I said: 'I'm going to be unconscious in the morning. I'm being moved into ICU, put on a ventilator.'

"And that was it. The next thing I knew that was just over two weeks later I woke up in the City Hospital in Belfast."

It was after three weeks in hospital that he was finally discharged, although he remembers very little about it.

Together in their garden, Mr McCullough and his wife Mary-Frances flick through the diary she kept during that time, noting all the developments, the letters she sent him, the setbacks and moments of hope.

But when he got home at Easter, there was still the recovery.

Doctors will tell you there is still a great deal to learn about Covid-19, not least the time it takes to recover from a bad case of it.

Dr Michael McKenna, a GP in west Belfast, says a long recovery time is to be expected.

"The normal phase for people with a viral illness who need ventilator support is two, three, possibly four days at tops," he says.

"We're seeing these individuals needing 14, 15 up to 20 days on a ventilator and that itself is very incapacitating.

"You become very quickly de-conditioned by your hospital stay and that takes an inordinate amount of time to recover from."

In his garden, Jack McCullough told me how difficult the recovery was, even after he got home.

"I had a bedroom downstairs," he said.

"My mother was ill several years ago and I bought a second hand wheelchair just to help us get her around, so that was in the shed, so we got the wheelchair out.

"Mary-Frances was wheeling me back and forth to the toilet, into the kitchen to get something to eat and it's only a few metres. It's not that far, but that's what we had to do."

Dr McKenna said doctors cannot always tell who will recover the most quickly.

"It's hard to know, because many of these people will previously be fit and well, so it's difficult to pick a group. It's likely that it is related to the impact that it has on your immune system."

It is now summer time, but Jack McCullough admits he still is easily exhausted.

He has been taking the time to try to process what happened to him, and how he learns from it.

"At the time in ICU while I was unconscious, I have memories," he explained.

"My memory was: 'I need to get home; I just need to get home.'

"So being able to be home with my family and with my kids, even if we can't go out, even if I can't do the stuff that I would like to do, just being here, that is more precious than anything else, and I think that gives us a fresh perspective.

"It certainly has given me that and our family that, a fresh perspective in, you know, what's really important in life."