Well-known café owner Linda van Den Engel in hospital with corona… (Antwerp)
Café Den Engel, one of the city’s future pubs, will have to do without its always sympathetic café owner for a while. Linda Van Heymbeeck is in hospital with a corona infection and she is having a hard time. Both of her are tall and talking is difficult. “I can’t talk properly, because then I get short of breath,” Linda tells us on the phone. It is interrupted several times by a heavy cough.
“I first tried to get sick at home,” Linda says. “The hospitals are already overcrowded, so I didn’t want to put an extra burden on them. But after a few days I got a lot of difficulty breathing. I must honestly say that I have never felt so sick. The feeling of dying was very close. If your plots have trouble breathing, it’s very frightening.”
In between, Linda is given a ventilator in the Sint-Augustinus hospital in Wilrijk. “Chapeau to the nurses and doctors here. They continue to take care of me with a smile. They do a fantastic job. I can’t say that about contact tracing. They have scared me more than reassured me. Everything they go against is what my GP tells me. And when the lady on the phone said she was going to inquire, the line went down. Unlikely.”
Hundreds of messages of support
Linda posted her situation on Facebook Monday evening. More than eight hundred people better already left a comment to wish hairdressing. “I’ve already felt better, but I’m not languishing here. I get a lot of messages and those reactions on Facebook also make me smoke a lot.”
However, there are also some dubious messages. “There are apparently people who take pleasure in having me in the clinic,” she says. “There you are, hey, send them to me. Corona really brings out the worst in people.”
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Not so long ago Linda had to deal with that as well. After receiving the Covid Safe Ticket in the catering industry at the beginning of November, she even received. It was openly to boycott cafe Den Engel. “I then complained, because I really got,” says Linda.
“I really couldn’t let that pass. I can really get excited about that, but when I see myself here, you understand all the more how important those measures are. Sure, I’ve been vaccinated twice, so that should give those antivaxers something to continue. But according to the doctor it is really exceptional. I also face a long recovery. I’m not the youngest anymore, that also plays a part of course. But thanks to all those nice messages and the fantastic team in Den Engel, I will make it through here.”