"I woke up the next day and felt like trash. I felt I had inhaled glue. My throat was sticky. I was coughing. Lots of migraines. Horrible migraines. It just went from feeling great to taking a five-hour nap in the afternoon."
Hear from survivors of all ages and their stories of how they coped with the coronavirus. Click on their names to read more.
"I woke up the next day and felt like trash. I felt I had inhaled glue. My throat was sticky. I was coughing. Lots of migraines. Horrible migraines. It just went from feeling great to taking a five-hour nap in the afternoon."
"Her first symptom was so mild that she didn’t even mention it to her parents at the time."
"You can't take life for granted; you have to be thankful every day because you never know what could happen."
"My generation is not immune to this."
"It's definitely the most traumatic time of our life. It's never something that you'd imagine would happen to you specifically."
"You could feel it going through your veins and it was almost like someone injected you with straight-up fire."
"It was probably the scariest time of my whole life."
"You think maybe I’m done, maybe I’m healing, and it knocks you back down."
“This can happen to you.”
"I thought it was just me having the flu and being a big baby."
"I just really think it’s important for people to know that all of this is super serious.... We’re all-in on making sure that there is a collective idea toward wellness and protecting others.”
"At one point I thought, am I alive or dead?"
"I just felt like I'd been hit by a truck."
"Being immunocompromised and in his 50s, he thought this was it."
“It was stressful for him as a patient, but also stressful for us as a care team."
"Please take it serious, it’s brutal"
"Those first 11 days were a blur, spent almost entirely lying down. From my bed. To my couch. Back to my bed again. The aches would subside, but the fatigue parked itself inside my bones and caused me to think it would never leave."
"The virus was real. It's not fake. It did not care who I was, what my nationality was, what my heritage was nor what my political affiliation was. I want you to self quarantine not because I worry about every one else. I do it for selfish reasons. I want my friends and family to be safe. I want my mom who's in her 80's who always gets sick to be able to see her grandkids and great grandkids without fear of getting sick from this. "
"All the little things you do that you take for granted were lost,” he said. “Walking up and down the hallway felt like I was running a marathon."
"He was coughing and knew he had something that couldn't be treated by Tylenol."
"It was really difficult...I did a lot of crying. My parents passed before me, my older sister passed before me and I could feel them there with me."
“With a lot of conditions, older adults don’t present in a typical way, and we’re seeing that with COVID-19 as well."