Purab Kohli details his coronavirus journey and the emotional struggle that came with it

After contracting the coronavirus, Bollywood actor Purab Kohli is now shedding light on the challenging journey that he and his family went through to battle the disease.

During an interview with Hindustan Times, the Rock On actor revealed how he got the symptoms, how he recovered and the entire emotional process of battling the disease.

Detailing about the symptoms and how he felt, Kohli said: “My daughter got it first on the weekend, my wife got it on Monday and I got it on Tuesday. My son’s temperature started with about 99-100 on Wednesday and by night he got 104 degrees fever. Though I didn’t think that we got the virus, and even my children were doing fine, but my wife was pretty sure she never felt this cough before. Then my cough started setting in and we started feeling breathless too.”

“And the GP told us that the first 7-8 days from the day we started getting the symptoms are crucial, and after that you aren’t contagious any more. In UK, you can go out, exercise and it is a little more lenient than other countries. But then we stopped stepping out immediately. What really hit the nail was when my daughter’s friend’s mother got serious and hospitalised. My daughter and her friend were playing a lot so we got convinced that we had Covid-19,” he added.

Speaking about the emotional struggle, Kohli said: “While I wasn’t taking it seriously, Lucy was worried. Once panic sets in easily, it’s not easy to handle. So we decided to slow down and take it easy. As I said, we kept the phone away as that was a big distraction. We focused on ourselves. We keep ourselves hydrated with water, lots of juices, got our vitamin and mineral intakes right.”

“Keeping our mind clear, focusing on positives gave us strength. We’ve also started doing light exercise. You must give yourself time to recover and rest, rest and rest.”

Treading ahead towards the precautions he is now taking, Kohli said: “We were in quarantine for 17 days. We are still in isolation. There’s a group in every neighbourhood here, and the idea is to help those in need and those who can’t step out given the ailment. They helped us with veggies and other basic amenities. Now that I’m doing better, I’ve also started doing the same.”

Giving his take on the misinformation rife about the disease, the actor said: “Panic sets in easily, so we tried relaxing and cut ourselves from all the negativity via any source - be it social media, news, Whatsapp and followed only authentic source of information.”

“We all know enough already and that the virus is new, and so there’s no medicine. And that the body needs to build the anti-bodies. So we need to build our immunity system. There are a few things that I just normally have been doing since a kid, like having the ginger haldi, clove, pepper, honey and cinnamon boiled in water. We all drink that. We’ve also been doing salt water gargles, steam and taking Ayurvedic medicines that I got from India. Since we started feeling breathlessness and chest congestion from the eighth or ninth day onwards, all these things helped. We also tried staying calm, meditate, do yoga and concentrated on our breath.”