Covid intensive care is: hourly arterial blood samples to check oxygen levels, lines placed into arteries to sample them, lines in the jugular vein to replace electrolytes we have driven out of the body by trying to flush excess water from the lungs, lines into the neck and groin

To attach people to artificial kidneys - blood is pumped out of the body, round a circuit, and back inside, after being filtered of toxins. It is being away from home for at least a week or two or six, never able to get your breath, only able to oxygenate with a pressure mask

Leaving you breathless when it's taken off to eat and drink. It's being run from the ward to icu for an emergency intubation, to be put into a coma. To have a plastic tube inserted into your mouth and down windpipe, so a machine can breathe for you.

Hourly thick wet secretions, often green or blood stained have to be suctioned out of the lungs. Every so often the strain on the lungs is too much and one ruptures, needing a chest drain inserted between ribs into the thoracic cavity. Sometimes both lungs.

It's endless rounds of phoning micro to ask advice on yet another infection - sometimes fungal, maybe secondary viral such as CMV. Routinely a line infection or secondary bacterial pneumonia. It's starting on clarithromycin through to tazocin , meropenem, linezolid and the

Last frontier tigacycline - cultures coming back more and more resistant as time goes on. It's being unwell and developing bleeding in the gut, requiring cameras down the throat and adrenaline injected into ulcers to stop them bleeding.

It's blood transfusion after blood transfusion as the bone marrow starts to fail, and anaemia sets in. It's being turned on your front over and over to get the oxygen levels up - teams of five people to turn an intubated patient in a coma.

Whilst poorly, having constant head turns 3-4hourly to avoid brachial plexus/muscle injury and head sores. Having people constantly check and lubricate your eyes so there is no damage to the eye whilst on your front - people have gone blind.

It's being fed down a rubber tube through your nose into your stomach. It's diarrhoea, collected in a faecal version of a catheter. It's being catheterised so people can analyse and assess your hour by hour urine production.

When it comes to weaning and waking, it's having a trache put into the neck and trachea, temporarily taking away any ability to speak. After weeks of sedation and coma, it's waking, far away from friends or family, in a room full of people in PPE.

Awake, still unable to talk to loved ones on facetime as the trache is needed. It's having all those lines replaced, as they get infected or clotted up, every week roughly. It's having nightmares and seeing demons and the death of loved ones, in vivid hallucinations.

It's thinking you are imprisoned, trapped, or in hell, fluctuating between orientated and delusional. It's setbacks - another bleed, another infection. After weeks of steroids and coma, almost complete full body paralysis, barely able to move fingers, due to muscle weakness.

I've seen everyone from early thirties through to nineties, dying. The above is the story of icu survival, some never make it. Of course this represents a minority of covid patients, but it is bleak. Medics don't have a political agenda to oppress the masses.

But it isn't really our dream hospital right now. Vigilante style videos of empty outpatients don't really do this reality justice. Death figures, don't do survival reality, justice.