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In 2018, her first serious health problem was: cancer. Another fear in 2019: heart surgery. In March 2020, the coronavirus came, and retired Briton Dave Smith, 72, had to take on a new challenge. With reduced immunity after the cancer was once under control with heavy chemotherapy, he had an infection just off the curve.
The first test was positive, the second also, the third the same … After four months, the story began to get strange: there were already 15 tests and the virus did not go away. In all, Dave has been hospitalized seven times, lost 60 pounds, and has 43 positive COVID-19 tests back. The suffering lasted nearly a year: from April 2020 to March 2021.
Doctors are still not 100% sure how Dave will recover. They used experimental treatments that may have helped, and scientists at the University of Bristol are studying the case. The main challenge at the moment is figuring out how the virus hides and mutates in the human body – and how, after all, it manages to infect someone for so long.
“I don’t want to go paragliding, I don’t want to swim with a dolphin, I just want to live my normal little life. I’ve been seeing more of my friends and spending more time with my wife, and that was great,” says Dave.
Learn more about Dave and his story above.
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