News Americas, NEW YORK, NY, Thurs. April 2, 2020: A Caribbean-born immigrant in New York fought off the coronavirus and has returned to his work as a respiratory therapist in Brooklyn.
The New York Post reports Jamaican Raeburn Fairweather, 47, battled COVID-19 for two weeks in his Canarsie rowhouse, after he contracted the disease while working at Brooklyn’s Maimonides Medical Center on March 17th. Fairweather said he was tested for COVID-19 on March 18.
The hospital worker, whose job includes the hazardous task of inserting and removing ventilator tubes from the tracheas of coronavirus patients, told the post the virus made him feel like his body was falling apart.
“Headaches were immense,” Fairweather was quoted as saying. They were making my eyeballs feel like they were on springs.” He also said the illness temporarily robbed him of his senses of smell and taste while coughing up “thick, white mucus.”
“If your body cannot fight, you will not make it,” he told the paper. “It wears your body down.”
Fairweather said he used Tylenol as well as traditional Caribbean home remedies made with turmeric, garlic and ginger.
The married father of five quarantined himself in an extra room in his family’s Brooklyn home and used a bathroom that his wife and 11-year-old son who lives at home avoided.
He has now resumed work helping others in the pandemic.
