Aytana

Brief Outline:

Aytana works in education. She lives with her parents and older brother. Aytana was put on furlough during the pandemic. She took care of her parents when they caught Covid and was later infected herself. Aytana was able to recover well and has since been involved in helping with Covid testing.

 

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Aytana was working in a nursery when Covid first started. When the government rules about lockdown came in, her nursery shut, and she was put on furlough. She found the lockdown quite alarming and was also shocked at how people started to hoard groceries and domestic supplies such as toilet paper.
 
Aytana helped out when her mum and dad contracted Covid. Aytana was particularly worried about her parents during the pandemic given that they are older and have underlying health conditions. At that time, Aytana thought it “literally felt like the end of time was coming”. Aytana’s father felt very anxious while he had Covid but decided not to go to the hospital out of fear of not making it back home. While her parents were ill, Aytana felt like she had to stay strong for them. 
 
When Aytana had Covid, she had a temperature and felt aches and pains. She appreciated that her family dropped groceries outside her door while she was sick. Recovery took “quite a while”, and Aytana feels fortunate to have access to medical facilities and support. Aytana has since become involved with Covid testing at schools, as she wanted to participate in helping others. Looking back at her experience with Covid, Aytana feels that “it gave a different outlook to life… we should always be grateful and patient”.
 

 

Aytana found it sad when she couldn’t pay her respects at a neighbour’s funeral.

There was a death on our road as well. It was one of the neighbours and she was quite elderly and it was really, really sad because we knew them for a long time but. It’s like we couldn’t even go to them. It’s just people came outside their doors, and they literally saw a car take the coffin and just go and like we couldn’t even go to them properly to pay our respects or see them because there was that fear of like social distancing and you had to keep your distance.

Aytana got advice from her parents and her brother about what helped recovery when they had Covid.

It was okay because I kind of knew the drill. Okay, what’s working for my parents. What my brother told me when he had corona, what was working for him as well so he was dropping a lot of things as well and he was helping as well. He was like, “Try this try that. And this will definitely help you, you know, to breathe easily. It will unblock your nose and stuff.” That’s where he was good.