@adamwl12, please remember that my dad died from COVID. I also had two friends to die from it, including a woman in her early 30s with 4 kids!
My dad believed that COVID was "just a bad flu", too. Until he got it. He was in perfect health before he got COVID.
Two weeks after his diagnosis he was in ICU, and he was back and forth for at least a week every month. He was quickly put on oxygen, and couldn't walk without a walker. He loved Plaza del Sol so we took him often, but couldn't get from the car to the seat without taking multiple rest breaks. It wasn't long before he was put in a wheelchair.
Then in July while he was in the hospital, he stood up to go to the bathroom and his heart stopped! They had to bring in the crash cart, and called the family in at 2am to say goodbye.
He came back from that, but told me that while he was intubated he thought that he had died and gone to H*ll. He wasn't never entirely convinced that he hadn't died and that everything after that was Satan torturing him.
By that point, the doctors told us that his lungs were really nothing but scar tissue and were barely able to process oxygen at all. He could inflate them, but there was just nothing there to make them work. There was nothing they could do beyond a lung transplant, but there was no way he would survive such a surgery so all we could do was wait it out.
He had to move in with my sister after that. She told me that they could hear him, all night long, praying for God to help him because he just couldn't breathe.
At the end, when he was in Hospice, he spent about two weeks of begging the nurses to help him because he couldn't catch his breath. They had his morphine and Fentanyl on the maximum dosage, but he still couldn't breathe and felt like he was drowning all the time.
One of the last things he told me was that he "wished to God" (something he always said) that he'd listened and taken it more seriously.
His death was one of pure torture. We're talking about months of struggling to breathe, couldn't do any of the things he loved, couldn't even go to the bathroom by himself. And after witnessing that last week, I couldn't imagine a worse way to go.
Believe me, man. It's not the flu.
I saw my grandma die from lung cancer, and my mom died from COPD (both from smoking). Those were horrible and torturous ways to go, but dad's death was a million times worse. Imagine 5 years of lung cancer compressed into a few months.
It's just unimaginable, and I pray that none of you ever have to see it.
