A Prince George woman has a warning for COVID-19 naysayers; the virus is real and not to be taken lightly.
Svitlana Jeck lost her mother, Lidya, from COVID-19 in Ukraine just under one week ago.
She is sharing her grief in the hopes all members of the public will understand the severity of the pandemic, and what it can do.
“That’s what upsets me the most. That there are still people thinking that it’s not real and it’s a joke. That the government is taking their freedoms and telling them what to do. I see the reason why they are trying to keep the curve flat here, because if something happens and the hospitals get overwhelmed, then it will get out of control,” Jeck told MyPGNow.
“Maybe, whoever my mom got it from was strong or didn’t have any symptoms. But my mom ended up dying from it. This is very serious, and it hurts that people don’t understand, and it hurts that people don’t do their research and find out what other countries have been through.”
Jeck and her family are from Luhansk, a densely populated city in eastern Ukraine located near the Russian border in the heavily disputed Donbass region.
Home to nearly 426,000 residents, Luhansk is currently the capital of the Luhansk People’s Republic, an unrecognized nation established in 2014.
“It’s just, people are everywhere. So I told her to be super, super careful, and she was always ‘I’m trying, I’m trying,'” Jeck explained.
“The medication there is (at) a very big deficit. It’s hard to get good medication. Good doctors, the majority of them left. So, whoever stays, most of them volunteers. They have about 12 or 13 hospitals in that city,” Jeck said.
Lidya, immunocompromised, first became sick with what appeared to be a mild cold and fever at the beginning of September.
She went to see a doctor and was prescribed antibiotics and was on them for three weeks with no improvement.
Lidya’s last day at home before being admitted to hospital was September 22, where she would stay for one month before her death.
Because of a nine-hour time difference between Luhansk and British Columbia, Jeck would wake to Whatsapp updates from her family about her mother’s condition.
“I saw a message that said she had been admitted to hospital. They did an x-ray and seventy percent of her lung (function) was impacted,” she recalled.
Lidya was then put in a hospital meant for patients awaiting results from a COVID-19 test for about six days, but the facility was overwhelmed with patients.
“She was supposed to be the only one in that room because it’s unknown whether she had COVID or not. Meanwhile, there were dozens (of) people every day coming in with viral pneumonia, COVID related pneumonia. People just kept coming,” said Jeck.
“My cousin told me, he saw a woman absolutely in distress dying on the floor waiting to be admitted. By the time she got her results, she had six people in her room because they had nowhere to put them.”
After results are processed, patients are transferred to a different location depending on if they test positive or negative.
Due to the severity of Lidya’s symptoms, this made communication, especially speaking, difficult.
“I kept trying to call her. I could hear her, if she talks a couple of words she cannot breathe. I can see that the same couple of words puts her in extreme medical distress because she just drops the phone and is just suffocating. So I stopped calling her,” she said.
Visitors were also not allowed at this point, Jeck added, so her family corresponded with Lidya’s doctors by phone.
“Sometimes they answer, sometimes they don’t because they have a terrible shortage of doctors and nurses.”
Eventually, Lidya tested positive but due to short supplies and no ventilators, she was only given an oxygen mask for a few hours.
She was transferred to intensive care soon after because her heart began to fail.
“I think if she could have oxygen on time she would have had a chance,” said Jeck. “In ICU she was about a week to ten days.”
“At that point, we couldn’t talk to her much. At one point we couldn’t get any news for about a week.”
Lidya developed a number of complications including internal bleeding during her time in the ICU and was transferred to a different department in the hospital for another week.
That’s when Jeck and her family were told Lidya would likely not survive the illness.
Faced with the potential of losing her mother, Jeck tried once again to phone her, because she was unable to return to Ukraine to visit, due to travel restrictions.
“One day she answered, and honestly, I couldn’t understand. She made no sense,” Jeck recalled. “She said something that I couldn’t understand and then she dropped her phone and for about half an hour I could hear her calling for help…that’s the last time I heard her voice.”
“Nobody was for her there, holding her hand, or anything like that. It was just heartbreaking that no one could even talk to her on the phone,” said Jeck.
Eight hours later, on October 21st at 1:30 am, Lidya passed away from COVID-19 related heart, lung, and kidney complications at the age of 72.
Her family came to collect her body from the hospital, because the morgue, and hospital itself, were overloaded.
According to hospital staff, 30 other people passed away the same night as Jeck’s mother.
“They don’t even know anymore. They said it’s complete chaos, they’ve stopped counting what’s COVID and what’s not. But the majority, it’s COVID-related pneumonia,” Jeck said.
“They said she (Lidya) will be in a bag and we have to take her straight to a graveyard.”
In order to give their mother a proper burial, a second COVID-19 test was administered, to make sure there was no risk of transmission during funeral preparations.
When the result came back negative, Lidya’s family was allowed to take her body home, in Ukrainian Orthodox tradition, for an open casket viewing for one hour before she had to be buried.
Jeck and her son were able to video call with her family for the funeral, staying up till about 4:00 am in order to attend remotely.
“She looked unrecognizable. She looked so skinny and old. The change was drastic.”
Grieving her mother during a pandemic and across the world from the rest of her family has been nothing short of devastating, Jeck admitted.
However, there have been some things that have made the whole experience easier to deal with.
“The contact with my family back in Ukraine, because for me they are part of her. A little part of her. So every time my cousin or someone messages me every morning, asking me how I’m doing, it’s almost like they are a little part of her. So that was very helpful,” Jeck said, adding She, her husband, and their son have plans to visit her grave, once it is safe to travel again.
Jeck also has her own ways of honoring her mother’s memory in Canada until that day comes.
“When she visited Canada, she was feeding the crows! she was putting bread on top of the fence, along the fence and they were always so loud,” she recalls fondly.
“I said to her, ‘Mom. You’re attracting the crows and they are so loud! I mean really. They have enough to eat, it’s summertime.’ I said, go feed the squirrels or something, because really? Crows? out of all the living things? And she goes; ‘No. Look. They have babies. I see that they have babies in there, and they need to eat. That baby is so loud, they need to feed that baby.’ So she kept feeding the crows every single morning.”
“I will feed crows, in her memory. I will just go and feed the crows for her.”