Paris (AFP)
At the heart of the first wave, Corinne Benzekri had testified on leaving intensive care, breath chopped by her tracheotomy, of the "horror" of the Covid and her surprise at being still alive.
Nine months later, the consequences are so serious that she fears that she will no longer be quite a living woman like the others.
In March 2020, the 51-year-old woman spent her days calling ambulances for residents of the home for the disabled she runs, affected by several cases of Covid.
And then it was his turn.
His last memory: the emergencies of the Lariboisière hospital in Paris and his "funny" awakening after 15 days of coma, a 1.5cm hole in the throat.
"I am amazed to be alive, I have the impression of being dead and that I have been made to come back", she whispered, via an impressive cannula inserted in her throat, to the team of the 'AFP who had met her.
At the time, Corinne was already celebrating her first victories, such as being able to "talk", hold her phone in her hand, and her first sip of mineral water drunk with a spoon.
His testimony was upset but also indignant on social networks.
Nine months later, a ball of energy, made up and dressed in an elegant frilled blouse, opens the door to her apartment in eastern Paris.
"I look good. But inside it's chaos."
- "Regressions" -
"What is difficult is that every time I pass a step, there are regressions afterwards. For example, one day, I manage to take three steps in a row and, the next day, I wake up and I am paralyzed for sometimes weeks, ”she explains, referring to“ difficult times ”.
The severe form of Covid-19 contracted by Ms. Benzekri in March ravaged her body, from head to toe, skin and hair;
and his muscles, still atrophied, require up to four physiotherapy sessions per week.
His organs were also seriously affected: the liver, a kidney, and his venous system.
His last assessment was "correct but shows significant lesions" at the respiratory level, a "very weakened" heart and especially mobility difficulties with "slowness" and "pain during movement".
For Corinne Benzekri, as for thousands of French people, particularly those who have gone through intensive care, the devastating virus has left the body but left an organism permanently affected, a form of "long Covid".
Long, but until when?
With this illness, which it took seven months to have recognized as an "occupational disease", Ms. Benzekri feared above all "losing her place in society", her job, her reason for living.
- "Visions of horror" -
Her first return to her workplace in July gave her a milestone, she says.
"A few days before, something changed, the fact of being able to stand, in front of my teams, and to greet them, it was important for me (...) it was a turning point in the history of my disease, my body was able to take another step. "
She has since resumed part-time.
What misses most in this Parisian who worked without counting her hours, it is her scooter, "for ten months in the garage", and a "form of recklessness" that she left in the hospital, where she spent two months before requesting an early return home to begin rehabilitation in a more familiar environment.
"The battle is especially the first months, you have to be in an intensive rehabilitation at a time when the body can still recover and not grow back," she says.
And for the most invisible after-effects, those of the psyche, Corinne admits without wanting to linger "to think about it every day".
"There are also all these horror visions of what we lived in the hospital, which haunt you, the death that was there and that almost took me (...) It's very hard to to be on the side of the living, when we almost left. "
© 2021 AFP