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‘It was 50-50’: UK PM Boris Johnson reveals doctors had contingency plan if he died of Covid-19
Speaking to The Sun on Sunday, UK’s Prime Minister Boris Johnson recalled his brush with death, when he was administered ‘litres and litres’ of oxygen but ICU monitors showed little progress, forcing doctors to make plans to announce his passing away.
Doctors at a London hospital had made arrangements to announce the death of Prime Minister Boris Johnson, he revealed on Sunday, describing his near-death experience after contracting coronavirus and emerging after a stint in the ICU to the relief of many.
Johnson, 55, was moved to the St Thomas’ Hospital on April 5 when his condition worsened, and emerged on April 12, grateful to the medical staff for saving his life when, as he said, “things could have gone either way”.
Speaking to The Sun on Sunday, an emotional Johnson recalled his brush with death, when he was administered ‘litres and litres’ of oxygen but ICU monitors showed little progress, forcing doctors to make plans to announce his passing away.
He recalled: “It was a tough old moment, I won’t deny it. They had a strategy to deal with a ‘death of Stalin’-type scenario. I was not in particularly brilliant shape and I was aware there were contingency plans in place. The doctors had all sorts of arrangements for what to do if things went badly wrong”.
“It was hard to believe that in just a few days my health had deteriorated to this extent. I remember feeling frustrated. I couldn’t understand why I wasn’t getting better. But the bad moment came when it was 50-50 whether they were going to have to put a tube down my windpipe. That was when it got a bit . . . they were starting to think about how to handle it presentationally.”
Johnson went through mixed emotions within a month: recuperating in the country residence in Buckinghamshire and later witnessed his partner, Carrie Symonds, delivering his son, whose middle name is Nicholas, named after doctors Nicholas Price and Nicholas Hart, who saved his life in ICU.
Thanking the medical staff for bringing him back from a precarious condition, he said: “It was thanks to some wonderful, wonderful nursing that I made it…I can’t explain how it happened. I don’t know . . . it was just wonderful to see the . . . ”
The tabloid’s report said his voice faltered and eyes reddened during the interview in Downing Street, as he added: “I get emotional about it . . . but it was an extraordinary thing,” admitting that he was initially reluctant to go to the hospital.
He said: “I’ve broken my nose, I’ve broken my finger, I’ve broken my wrist, I’ve broken my rib. I’ve broken just about everything. I’ve broken all sorts of things, several times in some cases. But I’ve never had anything as serious as this”.
“All I remember feeling was just frustration. I couldn’t see why I wasn’t getting better. I was just incredibly frustrated because the bloody indicators kept going in the wrong direction and I thought, ‘There’s no medicine for this thing and there’s no cure’. That was the stage when I was thinking, ‘How am I going to get out of this?’”
He insisted: “It would be wrong to say that at any stage I thought, ‘Oh my goodness, this is it’. Some terrible buoyancy within me kept convincing me that everything would almost certainly be all right in the end. But I was just frustrated. I remember seeing a lot of other victims, both going in and going out of intensive care”.
According to the interviewer, David Wooding, Johnson is a changed man after the experience: “Over the years, I’ve met or interviewed Boris Johnson many times — but this meeting was like no other. Not only were we forced to sit far apart for social distancing, but it’s clear his brush with death has left him a changed man.”
As of Saturday, the UK’s death toll was 28,131 and had registered 182,260 coronavirus cases.
