Belfast lawyer describes coronavirus taking over his body: ‘You feel you’re suffocating, like your head is under water’

Niall Murphy, a lawyer with KRW Law, said that his wife had at one stage been told he had a 50-50 chance of survival after being admitted to hospital and placed on a ventilator.

In an in-depth interview on BBC Radio Ulster’s TalkBack show today, he said he had been “a big, fit sort of fella”, who had never been hospitalised with anything serious before.

He was placed in an induced coma for 16 days.

Now home as of this week, the father of three spoke of emerging from the coma.

“It’s hard to describe it,” he said.

“The first understanding was I had a facemask, I wouldn’t say bolted on, but very, very surely affixed.

“I knew there was tubes feeding me, I knew there was water and medicine going into me. But I also knew I’m in the right place and in the right hands.”

He had recently returned from a trip to New York (where a legal society had invited him to address a St Patrick’s Day event), and developed symptoms afterwards.

His wife found he had a very high temperature.

He had diarrhoea and no appetite.

He was admitted to Antrim Area Hospital on March 25.

“When the cough came, you’d get a bout of coughing and you just can’t breathe,” he said.

“You feel like you’re suffocating. You feel like your head’s under water.

“And I knew then I was in difficulties. That was frightening.”

He could also barely walk, he added.

“Even talking now, I’m just shaking,” he continued.

“I just can’t explain the esteem I hold every single health care professional who dealt with me.”

He said that the NHS is a “jewel” and that staff should be given a one-off cash payment akin to those handed out on the continent.

He likened health workers to the firemen who had raced into the smouldering Twin Towers on 9/11, and was critical of the government’s handling of the crisis.

He voiced scorn over Health Minister Matt Hancock’s idea of giving a special badge to NHS staff, saying: “If I was a nurse and Matt Hancock came anywhere near me with one of those badges, he’d know where to put it very, very quickly.”

Mr Murphy (who is on the board of governors of a primary school) said that just prior to falling ill he had been preparing a legal challenge to force the government to close schools, but that the official shutdown came before it had worked its way through the courts.

Mr Murphy’s biography on KRW Law says that among the people he has represented are Chris Ward, the man acquitted of involvement in the Northern Bank robbery, Brian Shivers, who was acquitted of involvement in the Massereene Barracks killings, plus “several Basque separatists”.