By Andi Brown
What they don’t tell you, when they are shoving a tube down your throat to keep oxygen flowing to your brain, is that while you are on a ventilator, the hair on back of your head will become badly matted. That’s when you will come to see me, your occupational therapist.
I meet Dylan in the rehabilitation unit of our small rural hospital. He has long chestnut hair that is snarled and stuck together because he was intubated for two weeks. He’s so weak that it takes five people or a mechanical lift to move him from the bed to the wheelchair, and he can’t feed himself.
I work my way through his knotted hair, saturating it with detangler, pulling apart the pieces and trying not to irritate his scalp. He’s a quiet man. He tells me that his grandmother died of COVID, that his mother and grandfather both got it.
“I think the COVID didn’t get to me as bad because I have COPD,” Dylan’s mother says. “There wasn’t anything for it to eat.”
“I wish I had COPD,” he says wistfully.
“Are y’all planning on getting the vaccine?” I say.
Dylan shakes his head, pulling his hair out of my grip. “No way. That shit’ll kill you.”