I must be the luckiest landlord

MATT DOCKRAY was working at a new upmarket food, drink and music venue in London when the coronavirus pandemic struck.

He admits he didn’t take the disease as seriously as he should have.

The 42-year-old sports enthusiast says: “Covid was just this thing where they said, ‘Oh, you have to wash your hands’. I joked in a meeting about which song we would have in the toilets to wash our hands to.

“We agreed to not make a big thing out of it or make things chaotic. That is as much credence as we gave it back then.”

The Aston Villa fan went to Wembley to watch his team play Manchester City in the Carabao Cup Final on March 1, 2020 with a couple of friends.

Mr Dockray, who has 20 years’ experience in hospitality, recalls: “We had a lot of beers and the next day I felt a bit hungover but then it never got better.

“I was doing a new venue launch at the time. My role was head of customer experience, so I was training all the staff, getting all the goods in and working with management to make sure that we were ready to open.

“I just felt like I had the flu. I was coughing all the time. The joke in the office was that I had bad man-flu. I was completely unaware that I had covid, so I was walking around, talking to suppliers, not knowing how contagious it was.

“We got to opening night and I was the chief host, so I was making sure that everything was running smoothly. We had VIPs, celebrities, just short of 1,000 people in total.”

After the opening, he needed two days off work and stayed at home in Marlow where he lived with his then wife and young daughter.

Mr Dockray says: “I put feeling even worse down to the stress of opening. I thought I was just run down.

“It was at that time that covid started becoming really serious. I think around 50 people had died. The week I went into the hospital was when the first lockdown began.

“I was still going to the pub. I went with my friends to watch Villa versus Leicester.

“I was feeling absolutely horrendous and I just wanted a beer but I remember it tasted like soda water. My friend tasted the beer and said there was nothing wrong with it. I had another pint but it still tasted bad, so I thought there was something wrong with the barrel. Villa got smashed 4-0 and I went home and from that day I could not get off the sofa. For three or four days I got worse and worse. I couldn’t breathe. There were no tests at the time, so I just thought that I had really bad flu.

“My wife was working at the Ship in Marlow at the time. She was out of the house all day, so I was at home alone. I was trying to take every medication possible but nothing was working.

“I can’t even describe the pain. There’s nothing like it. You are begging for it to stop. You feel it absolutely everywhere, from your fingers to your toes. I was coughing, retching even, but nothing was coming up. At the same time, I had a pounding headache and couldn’t breathe.

“Every time I tried to take a breath, I was coughing and coughing. My parents were getting really worried about me. They thought I might have covid but I said it was just a bad chest infection.

“I bought an oximeter, which goes on your finger to check oxygen levels. It was meant to be 96 or higher. Mine was at 84. I was constantly on the sofa because I couldn’t go to bed. I could only sit in a certain position comfortably and slept sitting upright.

“I decided to ring 111 just to speak to a doctor. I had spoken to one previously who gave me antibiotics. They asked if I had been to China. I hadn’t, so they assured me it wasn’t covid.

“I had a two-hour wait on the phone. I couldn’t get through to anyone. I remember on that day I just wanted to lie down in bed. I had completely given up, I was just really exhausted.

“At that point, my wife started panicking and rang an ambulance because it had got past the point now. She said she had never seen me like this.

“A first responder turned up. He did all the checks and radioed straight away, saying ‘This is a critical patient, we need to get him into hospital now’.

“I managed to make it a few steps on to the stretcher. The medical workers were in full PPE in case it was covid, which it turned out to be. It was all really surreal. I almost felt euphoric because it was all so weird. I even took a picture in the ambulance and sent it to my mate, saying ‘I told you I was ill’ because they had all been badgering me about not coming out.”

He was taken to Wexham Park Hospital in Slough.

“Everyone was in big suits,” Mr Dockray says. “It was really bizarre. You’ve seen on the news that people have died but when you’re there and you’re in a room alone, it is completely different.

“They did more tests on me and strapped me up to oxygen. It felt like hours before a doctor came.

“He said to me, ‘Look, you’ve got a very limited chance of survival. We are going to have to take you to intensive care and put a tube inside of you, put you to sleep and hope your body calms down and rectifies itself. But right now, you need to speak to your family and explain what has happened because once we put you to sleep, that could be it’.

“I was like, f***! I got the doctor to do it as there was no way I could. I was trying to record a video but how do you try to put that into words?

“We found out I had pleurisy. The left side of my lung had collapsed. It wasn’t receiving any oxygen and I had developed a chest infection.”

He was not told immediately that he had covid and only found out when he spotted a laminated rose over the door of his room.

Mr Dockray says: “It looked really weird, like a kid had drawn it. I had seen it over other doors, then one night, in a reflection, I saw that it was over mine too.

“I asked a nurse called Paolo who said I had covid and was in a critical state. The rose warns doctors and nurses not to go into the room. They don’t want to tell you in case you panic or give up.

“Finding out sent shockwaves through me. My family was holding on to the hope that it was not covid and it would be sorted. It scared them even more than me.

“For everyone else, you were just a number. One day the death count hit 599 and I remember it sunk in that if I had died that day it would have said 600. That felt really weird.

“They took me upstairs to the intensive care unit and I had to make the choice of going to sleep or not. I didn’t want to. I told them that if I passed out and became unresponsive, I wanted to be stuck on a life-support machine. This couldn’t be it. I don’t want to go. You can’t believe this is happening and you think, ‘Right, we’ll sort this out. There must be something we can do’.

“But then they explain it and say, ‘You’ve got progressively worse over two weeks, you won’t just get better. There is nothing we can do except give you oxygen and care to relax your body and let it fight itself’.

“There was no drug, no injection then. You think, ‘Oh, we’re in trouble here’.

“I asked if there was anything else they could do. They told me they had a trial machine, a non-invasive ventilator. It goes up the nose and hooks around the back.

“The only way I can describe it is if you put your head out the window and the air rushes up your nose, it feels like that. However, because the air in it is warm and moist, it causes infections in a lot of people. I took it.

“I was in bed lying completely still. My dignity was out of the window. I was wearing a catheter.

“But whether the machine worked or not, I stabilised in about four days. One night, it just kicked in. My heart rate went down and my oxygen levels went up.”

He could tell his condition was improving because of the visible difference in the people looking after him.

Mr Dockray, who is originally from Leeds, says: “I was in a closed room with a big, massive window that the doctors and nurses look through. The machine I was hooked up to was turned away from me, so I didn’t know the levels or anything. I could just hear the beeps. If any levels get too high an alert goes off.

“I could see the nurses’ moods changing. They usually stand at the window and not in the room but they would come in.”

He recalls an “amazing” nurse called Miranda.

Mr Dockray says: “She was a big, larger-than-life eastern European lady. She had an absolutely amazing character, just what I needed at the time. I didn’t want someone to hold my hand, I needed someone to get my a*** out of bed.

“She was swearing every two minutes. She was the kind of nurse that is always getting into trouble but one that spurs you on and keeps you going. All of her patients were fast asleep and 90 per cent of them would die, which took a huge toll on her.

“I was the only one able to talk, although I could only get three words out at a time. I was the one where they knew something was working. There was no rhyme or reason why people were there. No one was surviving — old, young, male, female. I remember a 23-year-old who came in and passed away. It feels so surreal and weird now.

“When I started stabilising, I watched euphoric sporting moments. It was really good as it kept my adrenaline going. I had to stay positive. It seemed to work.

“I had Paolo and Miranda looking after me constantly. They were in full masks and suits and couldn’t really talk to me, which felt like they were less human.

“I couldn’t talk but I could have non-verbal banter through the window. They would come to the window and pull faces and mess around. To do that job you need to have a sense of humour. It’s not like they’re enjoying themselves, they just have to keep going.

“Funny moments would happen. For example, a nurse would have to put on three masks and the entire hazmat suit before coming in to inject me. When one forgot their injection, they had to go out and get undressed all over again. Stuff like that gave me great amusement. The camaraderie among the nurses was great.

“The doctors would come every day for an hour, while the nurses were around me all day and night. The doctors would check on me and tell me bad news. The nurses kept me going.

“This experience will always stay with me. I am not deeply into religion. If I was, I would have said my prayers and thought, ‘This is what God wants’, and just let myself go. On the other hand, I am the ultimate competitor, so I wanted to fight.”

He was in intensive care for exactly a week before going home. He says he would have stayed for three or four weeks but the hospital was desperate for beds.

Mr Dockray recalls: “They told me if anything got worse again, I could call them and they would whisk me back in but they needed the bed. They asked if I had someone at home able to care for me. My wife was in cabin crew for 20 years and has a really high level of medical knowledge, so they were happy but still rang me every day.

“My lung had started kicking back in, so I hoped for the best.

“When I came home, I felt so much relief. There were lots of tears. My daughter Eleanor was nine at the time and was trying to work out what had happened after seeing her dad wheeled out of the house. My wife had to be strong for her as she didn’t understand the severity of it.

“It was nine months before I saw the rest of my family. I ended up seeing my parents at a service station. It was very emotional. We are a very close family and this ripped them apart.

“My dad was on Sky News crying about me. Seeing your parents cry is a very weird thing.

“The progress being so quick made it even more bizarre. I went from being told I was not going to survive to sitting on the sofa with my family. I felt lucky to have come out the other side. When I was in bed, alone, thinking I was going to die, I thought there was no one worse off but there were people who didn’t make it. So you have to think about the positive.

“I had no family with me. I had no one in my room. I could FaceTime people, that was about it. Left to your own devices, it’s just you and your thoughts. You can either go really dark or remain positive.”

When he got home the whole country was in full lockdown.

Mr Dockray says: “While I was going through this, everyone else was going through their own stuff. They were locked up at home, out of their jobs, wondering what they were going to do. There was loads going on; it was mental chaos for everyone.

“As my wife and I both worked in hospitality, we spent limited time together. Then we were forced together the whole time. She and my daughter did lots of Joe Wicks’s exercises. I remember sitting on the sofa or at the desk watching them do that every morning. Everything that we went through seems surreal now.

“One day, I started feeling better and put a post on my Facebook page. I sent a picture of me hooked up to the machine, warning people that covid was real and that they shouldn’t go out because everyone was giving two fingers to covid.

“Overnight, it blew up. Sky News was trying to get in touch. They found my dad and he went on the television spreading the same message.

“Everyone wanted to speak to me as I was an eyewitness. I was the first to come out and survive this ordeal. People were intrigued.

“I wanted people to stop being stupid. People called me a conspiracy theorist, an actor, desperate to be famous. They would send messages telling me I was spreading government lies. I thought, ‘How can someone do this after all I have been through?’

“On the flip side, many people I hadn’t spoken to in years got in touch to wish me well. It shows who your real friends are.

“Every morning, I was doing TV appearances. I was relatable as I was just some bloke who drinks at the pub.

“I chatted to Piers Morgan. There was a joke that Captain Tom and I were the only two people on his show that he hadn’t shouted at. It was fun to do. It was exciting but was also good therapy. I got to talk about my ordeal and purge it.

“Being the spokesperson for those who had died also gave me purpose. I told people about the symptoms and the risks. People thanked me and it did some good.”

It took “ages” for him to recover. Mr Dockray says: “I couldn’t walk to the shower without completely exhausting myself. Everything in my body had been starved of oxygen for three weeks. Physically, it took me three months to recover before I could go for a long walk or get on a bike. Mentally, I still struggle now.”

He was made manager of the Little Angel in Remenham Lane before it re-opened last month and runs it with Phil Renner.

They used to be general manager and chief operating officer respectively of the Flat Iron Square in London Bridge, an open-air bar venue with live music and street food.

The Little Angel, a Brakspear pub, had been closed since May.

Mr Dockray says: “I honestly don’t think I would have opened the pub if it weren’t for what I went through.

“Before, work was about salaries and working harder, now it is about holistic projects. It is about doing something I enjoy and can do with friends.

“I am doing something that makes me happy. I love doing admin, hospitality and engaging with people. Old Matt would not have been bothered; now I have a positive mindset and a new drive. It is like a new lease of life.

“Two years ago, I’d never have expected to be here. This is the dream. I am working with great friends who are talented, immersed in my job and working for myself.

“I am not religious but there must be someone’s looking out for us. I guess it is the old little angel. You have to treat it as a gift.”