It does not require us to remember how to breathe, but it is different with Rhea, the young British woman who recovered from Covid-19 disease and lives in London, and she is now learning something that is not in our mind at all.
"It was a natural act I did," said Raya, who works as a sales manager. "I have to remember the inhale and exhale again. I forgot how to breathe." According to the BBC, which documented her difficult experience, Raya is still in self-isolation, unable to see her parents and siblings, not even hugging her husband who lives with her, and she still wakes at night and suffers while breathing.
Covid-19 symptoms began to appear on Ria while in hospital, for surgery.
Her entry to the hospital was supposed to be routine. But as she recovered from the operation there, she began suffering from a breathing problem, then developed her condition and a rise in her body temperature.
While everyone was hoping that her condition was a side effect of the surgery, she was given a Covid-19 test, as a precautionary measure only. Ria was troubled at the time, so she started taking notes on her mobile phone and documented her experience on the social networking site, Facebook.
As her health deteriorated, her need for oxygen increased, and she was transferred to one of the main epidemic treatment centers in London. Ria remembers the faces of doctors and nurses who were observing her condition during the two days and nights, which was very difficult, as her body desperately tried to fight the disease.
"Things have gone from bad to worse," she wrote on Facebook, "and my inhale became difficult as if I were climbing a mountain."
"I was about to die, I was almost never hoping to get out there," she says. "I got to a point where I started writing difficult letters to my family .... I was about to die and now I'm alive. How can life return to normal?" After all that? ".
Rhea does not know whether she has had pneumonia, but she says that she is still able to hear "crackling" in her lungs until now.
Rhea's recovery was slow. At first, she was barely able to move in the hospital because of the pain, and was given morphine injections in addition to oxygen. She was only able to speak with difficulty.
Rhea returns to her home, but she still has to keep a distance between her and her husband. At home, she must keep a distance between her and her husband, as she is still bound by coughing attacks.
"I went through a stage on this trip that I did not know if I would see the light again. There was nothing certain, and although I always knew how much I loved my family, at those moments I realized how much I needed them," she concluded. I cannot describe the moment I left the hospital. "