In early January 2021, Andrew Rear’s health took a turn for the worse.

After suffering two weeks with COVID-19, the 50-year-old former head of Munich Re’s Digital Partners thought he was on the mend. Almost without warning, however, he began to worsen and then increasingly struggled to breathe.

Within a day, after consulting with his doctor, an ambulance was on its way to take him to the hospital. He was so sick he doesn’t remember the night the ambulance came. But his wife does.

“My wife said she’d never seen me really frightened in the 27 years we’ve been married,” Rear recalled from his UK home, where he is now in recovery. “She said I just looked frightened like a small boy.”

Rear, who is now chair of the InsurTech Buckle, shared his COVID-19 story with Carrier Management after highlighting his experience on Twitter. It is a story many others have experienced during the pandemic: initial COVID symptoms similar to the flu, a few tough weeks, some signs of improvement and then an unexpected negative turn.

Pre-Christmas Warning

Rear’s COVID-19 descent began a few days before Christmas. While he was avoiding the virus and quarantining at home, his wife worked in a school as an essential worker. At that point, Rear said COVID-19 was spreading rapidly in London schools, and she caught it on Dec. 18, 2020. Two days later, he did too.

Rear, who has no pre-existing conditions, saw the transmission as inevitable, considering they live in a “fairly modest” size house, making a successful quarantine almost impossible.

Initially, he had flu-like symptoms and a temperature that ran as high as 101—a milestone for him. Then came the joint and muscle pain, the exhaustion, and the “COVID dry cough.” Rear said it didn’t bother him all the same. He felt crappy till a few days before Christmas, but nothing unusually awful.

“If I’m a little bit more breathless and feel a little bit older than I did a few months ago, at least I’m still here.”—Andrew Rear

“This is one of the things that nobody tells you…when you’ve got COVID. COVID does specific things to the water in your body. It diverts it from your kidneys to other places like your lungs and your bowels. And so, you’re supposed to drink three liters of water a day,” Rear explained. “I don’t know how much I was drinking, but I was drinking a lot.”

Despite the massive intake of water, Rear was still dehydrated. The headaches came next, and they got worse. Over-the-counter pain relievers didn’t help for more than 30 minutes at a time.

But things for Rear and his family were at least relatively stable.

“Thankfully, I had my son and my daughter in the house, as well. My son was sick for a couple of days and then he recovered. My daughter had it before, so she didn’t catch it again. She was looking after us, doing a lot of the cooking,” Rear recalled. “My wife—she was pretty sick but not quite like me. So, she was able to drag herself around and function. Between us, we managed to put together a Christmas dinner and we tried to be normal. But honestly, most of that time, I just sat on the sofa staring into space. I found that I couldn’t even watch the TV. I was better off just staring out of the window like a zombie.”

After about two weeks—by Sunday, Jan. 3—Rear’s fever went away and his headaches stopped. Dehydration and exhaustion remained, and he was a bit breathless, but at least there was some improvement.

“I felt like I was getting better and the other symptoms had more or less disappeared,” he said.

Monday and Tuesday came, and Rear even completed a few hours of work. Come Wednesday, however, he noticed he stopped getting better, even as his wife recovered and her strength returned. By Wednesday night, he struggled to breathe and could only do so normally if he sat and did nothing. Moving around or trying to stand took his breath away.

Rear stayed in bed all day Thursday but, by that night, his breathing was even worse. That evening he hobbled down the steps to greet his wife after she returned from work, and something was horribly wrong.

“I went downstairs just to say, ‘Hello, how was your day?’ and I couldn’t even get the words out,” Rear recounted calmly. “I just sat on the kitchen floor and I had to be helped to the sofa.”

An urgent call to the doctor led to an ambulance call and a trip to the hospital by early Friday morning (luckily one designated as a COVID specialist center). It turns out that Rear had a severe chest infection—a secondary problem common to patients with severe cases of COVID-19.

Because his infection attacked his already COVID-damaged lungs, Rear needed oxygen to function normally, lots of intravenous fluids, steroids to help maximize oxygen flow and “horse-sized quantities of antibiotics to sort the thing out.”

Heroic Hospital Care

While Rear was not in intensive care, the experience was intense for him as he dealt with caregivers wearing personal protective equipment all around him. He said he was in awe of how he and other patients were treated.

“They were flat out working the entire night,” he said. “I was in a ward of 33, which was completely full. The nursing staff, they were nearly 40 percent down on capacity because nurses have been getting sick. ”

Rear was treated in a three-patient group where a nurse constantly alternated her attention between the three.

“She was astonishing,” he recalled. “The doctors, as well, but particularly the nurses. They’re doing an incredible job.”

Grateful, and Good Words on Twitter

Rear was so impressed by his experience in the hospital that he wrote about it on Twitter, in part to combat misinformation about COVID-19 and the trouble it has caused around the world. “Most of these people are completely ignorant of what it’s actually like. So, now I came away with these two impressions. First, that the [UK National Health Service] staff, our medical staff are working just unbelievably hard and yet still provide really proper care,” Rear said.

Rear remembers his doctor as incredibly patient, caring and attentive, even though she likely had patients in multiple wards to look after. “She probably had a couple of hundred people that she was dealing with, most of whom at that point were far sicker than me, and yet at no point was she itching and looking at her watch,” Rear said.

“The other impression that I thought was important to get across was they really are now getting on top of how to treat the disease and the after-effects. And I think everybody needs to take care and recognize that anybody can get this, anybody can end up in a bad situation in hospital.”

After a couple days in the hospital, Rear said he was glad to be finally on the mend and grateful for the care he received.

“I’ve got a pretty long road toward complete recovery, as I should expect for months, but the reality is, I’d already given up my ambition of becoming an England football captain,” Rear joked. “So, if I’m a little bit more breathless and feel a little bit older than I did a few months ago, at least I’m still here.”