The 34-year-old from Dublin first got symptoms of coronavirus on 20 March. He was leaving work and had a tickle in his throat. He says it wasn’t bothering him or persistent so he didn’t think anything of it.

“It’s battle after battle.”
That’s how Ciaran O’Neill describes the last six months.
The 34-year-old from Dublin first got symptoms of coronavirus on 20 March. He was leaving work and had a tickle in his throat. He says it wasn’t bothering him or persistent so he didn’t think anything of it. He came home, developed a temperature, and his cough became worse. He also felt pressure on his chest.
Hospitalised
He went to hospital. They told him to go home and self-isolate. Four days later he continued to get worse. On 27 March his partner came into check on him and he was struggling to breathe.
Ciaran O’Neill in hospital
He went back to Tallaght hospital. A day later he was put in a coma and on a ventilator. He went in to full respiratory failure and spent 16 days on the ventilator.
Slow recovery 
When he first got discharged from hospital, he was taking two injections into the stomach for blood thinning. He was also on seven tablets a day. He is still on two painkillers a day.
He says: “I couldn’t do anything for myself. I had awful pain. I was fragile, and was walking around like a 90-year-old man.”
He lost over two stone and could not feed himself certain foods because his hand tremors were so bad.
He says that going up the stairs he had to go up on his hands and knees and down on his bum. He says it was a struggle, but did get better gradually.
The pain has never gone away but the hand tremors have gone. He is now walking unaided.
Daily battles
Ciaran O’Neill says you go from a battle to go home, to a battle with every symptom, to not being in work with the financial battles there.
He says there is also a mental battle that he is going through since his partner returned to work because he says every day is pretty much Groundhog Day for him.
Ongoing symptoms
He has recovered a lot but still has a long way to go. He suffers from fatigue: if he walks to the local shop which is no more than three hundred metres up the road, he says he could be out of action for two days afterwards.
He struggles with his breathing still, he has heart palpitations, constant night sweats, and is only getting about 4/5 hours sleep a night.
He says that the virus is not a conspiracy:  “It is out there and you do not want it.”
No underlying conditions
Mr O’Neill says he had no underlying health conditions whatsoever. He says he rarely had a cold or the flu.  He says it was a surprise to be this way and to get it as badly as he did.
He says he was angry about things, but he just keeps thinking of the hospital staff and what they did for him.
He says they kept him alive, and at a time when he couldn’t have family around him, they became like a family to him.
Future 
He doesn’t know yet when he will be back to work. He says he’s been told it may be next year before he’s fit enough to return, once he’s checked out by a lung specialist. 
“Never in a million years, did I think when I left the hospital that six months down the road I’d still be in no man’s land, when it comes to knowing when can I recover, when can I return to work, when can I get back to my life.”
He tells people: “Wise up to the virus. and respect the virus because you do not want it.”
I fought my war and I won
Ciaran O’Neill holds up army medals that were presented to him and says: “My dad is a former Irish soldier, a Congo Veteran. When I got out of hospital, he presented me with his medals and called me his hero for surviving. I fought my war and I won. I came home.”
“Growing up he was always our hero. For him to turn around and do something like that for me was just…I’ll never forget the day it happened.”
Ciaran O’Neill says he looks at them every day and he just remembers that he got through it.
He says: “I’m still fighting. But I know I’ll get there eventually.”