During that period of which he can no longer remember anything, he was told several times at his bedside: stop it, this is no use. “There came a point where they said: this is the last thing we can try. And then it stops.”
Lost for three months
He came to that day. “I hear my son-in-law ask: what day is it? I say: Thursday. He says: right – but which month?” Then he was off by three months. “I just lost it.”
He was not vaccinated. He is a skipper and due to the irregularity of his work he simply hadn’t gotten around to it yet. “I had received a call, asked if it could be done on another date, but it still didn’t work. Not at the GGD, not at the GP. But if I had known what awaited me, I would have moved heaven and earth to to be vaccinated in time.”
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But you don’t know in advance, says Visser. “I have five children, we have all always been healthy. I believe we once bought a box of paracetamol and that was twenty years ago.”
Virus is hacking in
Healthy or not, he never expected that the coronavirus would cut into it like this. “I’m still not the old one. It remains to be seen what I will end up with in the long term. But I’m glad I can still sit here.”
While he was in the ICU in a coma, diaries were kept about him and films were also made at his bedside. “Do you want to see that, they asked. Well, maybe some time later. Not just yet.”
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“People who haven’t been vaccinated sometimes don’t believe how close I’ve been to death,” says Visser. ‘Along the abyss’ he went. “And in the first instance the real victims were of course my wife and children. They have been around me the whole time.”
Consequences for others
Your decision whether or not to take the corona vaccine also has consequences for others. “That’s why I would recommend everyone to get vaccinated. It prevents this kind of excess.”
He is ‘a very well-known person’ on Urk, he says. The piles of cards and letters he received in the hospital are a sign of this. Now he wants to use his fame for a good cause: convincing others to get vaccinated against the corona virus.
“They are probably willing to listen to me on Urk. My condition has made a lot of people think.”
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