NI country music professional: It felt like the virus was trying to crush me, to stop me breathing’

A Co Fermanagh man has spoken of his experience of having Covid-19 - and urged others who have experienced what it’s like to be affected by the illness to resist the fear of “stigma” and speak out.

Malcolm McDowell, an independent country music professional, and has important connections within the local country music business in Ireland, as well as formerly being a singer himself, was bed-bound for a fortnight with the condition recently.

The 43-year-old from Brookeborough, who is also a presenter on Irish Music Memories on Sky TV, had been working hard at bringing a little country cheer to people who were living in care homes around the Province before he fell ill with the virus.

He had brought together a group of local singers and musicians to play outside care homes, while he served up tray bakes for the staff and residents. Indeed, the caring country singer has experienced more than his fair share of ill health in the past; he had a brain tumour and a bowel tumour, and has also suffered from fibromyalgia and a Hiatus Hernia, which was brought on by persistent vomiting before emergency surgery to remove the obstruction in his bowel.

“I had been told that I was vulnerable because of my past conditions and should isolate,” he relates, adding that he still suffers from nerve damage down the right hand side of his face and body due to the brain tumour.

“I’d also like to mention at this point that I have always been very particular about cleanliness and hygiene, and would have followed the strictest guidelines.”

Malcolm had been living in Belfast until last December when bad news came again in the form of his beloved mother Doreen being diagnosed with mouth cancer.

He moved back to Co Fermanagh where he still rents a cottage, so he could be close to her and his father Douglas.

Seeing his mother so sick, helpless and vulnerable, he admits, hit him harder than anything else in his life.

Doreen had taken ill right in the middle of a major country music awards event which Malcolm was running, so the stress of everything began to take its toll, and once that ended, “it all just came to a head”.

He says: “I was just totally wrecked. I had been looking after my mum and dad, and doing all the shopping, as well as bits of shopping for other people in the village, as well as organising the music parties outside nursing homes.

“Then before Easter, I started to feel unwell. It started in my left arm, then down the left side of my chest.

“Initially I thought it was because I was carrying all the shopping bags, but it was still there the next day.

“Also, I had had a chest infection a few years ago, but this didn’t feel like that at all, it was completely different.”

Malcolm said that the main difference was that you could “actually feel this squeezing your lungs”.

He adds: “It felt like it was trying to crush you, like it was trying to actually prevent you from breathing.

“I knew at that stage that I had the virus, and I was more concerned about the fact that I might not be able to go to the shops for my mother or anybody else.”

Malcolm also experienced another emotion - fear. He was worried about what people might think of him, for having potentially exposed himself to the virus.

“I felt somehow that this was my own fault, and that made me even more resistant about contacting doctors or hospitals or anything. I actually felt guilty, and that I had brought it on myself. But I don’t think I realised the repercussions of it, and in a way too I had just wanted to put my family first.”

Aside from the agonising chest pain, Malcolm also experienced itchy eyes - “like hay fever” - and a fatigue that left him bed-bound and unable to move. It was two weeks before he finally started to feel better. Scans showed inflammation on his lung, and he also picked up a kidney infection and an ear infection.

He admits that he’s still not totally over his illness, in spite of being given medication. But he’s feeling positive and grateful at the very least, he says, for the fact that he was in the Fermanagh countryside when he took sick. “Having so much free time during lockdown gave me more time to appreciate all the small things, and I was so glad that I was in Brookeborough when this happened. Imagine if I had been stuck in an apartment in Belfast? I’m so lucky to have a wee cottage with a big yard and I’m overlooking fields and nothing else - it’s so peaceful.”