Doctors caring for British Prime Minister Boris Johnson as he battled coronavirus were prepared for the worst.
“It was a tough old moment, I won’t deny it. They had a strategy to deal with a ‘death of Stalin’-type scenario,” Johnson told The Sun newspaper. “I was not in particularly brilliant shape and I was aware there were contingency plans in place.”
Johnson said he was given “liters and liters” of oxygen through “the little nose jobbie.”
He kept asking himself: “How am I going to get out of this?” during his stay at a London hospital last month, Johnson said.
“It was hard to believe that in just a few days my health had deteriorated to this extent. I remember feeling frustrated. I couldn’t understand why I wasn’t getting better,” he told the paper. “But the bad moment came when it was 50-50 whether they were going to have to put a tube down my windpipe.
“That was when it got a bit . . . they were starting to think about how to handle it presentationally.”
He credits his recovery to “some wonderful, wonderful nursing.”
Johnson was released from the hospital April 12. His fiancée, gave birth to their son 17 days later. The boy was given the middle name Nicholas after two of the doctors who saved his father’s life.