Robert Larrabee is in quarantine inside his home after being diagnosed with COVID-19

By Tiffany Goodwein

Medicine Hat man chronicles life with COVID-19

May 16, 2021 | 5:42 PM

MEDICINE HAT, AB – A Medicine Hat man says he can hardly recognize himself as he battles COVID-19 from his home.

Earlier this month, Robert Larrabee tested positive for the virus, alongside his wife Brenda, who was diagnosed with the UK variant. Since then the two have been isolating at home.

During the first day of diagnosis, Larrabee says they tried the typical home remedies for the flu. While some relief was felt, the next day, it was a much different story.

“It just knocked me down ever harder. It got progressively worse and worse, and the symptoms got worse,” Larrabee said.

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His wife Brenda didn’t experience as severe of symptoms, but for Larrabee, chills, cold sweats, shallow breathing, and coughing became his reality.

The symptoms eventually became so severe that the ambulance had to come twice this past week. The second time, Larrabee was rushed to hospital.

“I couldn’t sit up, I couldn’t lay down. I was really fighting for air, and so this time they took me in and found out that I had fluid in my lungs and that’s why I get this drowning sensation, it’s terrible,” he said.

Doctors gave him steroids and sent him home. But the symptoms still persist.

“The last couple of days I have just been coughing and hacking, coughing and hacking, and it breaks all the blood vessels in your face. It wears you out, because once you start you can’t stop, and it is hard to breathe in between,” Larrabee said.

His biggest fear, he says, is that he will end up in ICU and on a ventilator.

Aside from diabetes, Larrabee says he is otherwise a healthy person. He exercises daily along with his wife, and together they took all the precautions.

“It’s deadly, and I am a healthy guy, and I tell you. I had a foot on both sides and I could have gone either way. If I hadn’t gone in to see a doctor, I don’t know what would have happened next, because the next step would have been that my lungs would have shut down” he said.

Right now, his in-laws are helping to bring food and other items to his house. He lost his sense of smell and taste, but he is slowly regaining it.

Meantime, amid rising divisiveness and tension across the country, Larrabee urges everyone to come together for the common good to defeat COVID-19 once and for all.

“We’ve got to smarten up, there are variants on the horizon, they are going to be much worse. We got to get these ones flattened” he said

“If we feel that our freedoms are being taken away, just because we are having to wear a mask, social distance and consider our fellow Canadians then we have lost our way,” he said, pointing to other historical events that saw Canadians make even greater sacrifices.