Now on bbc news its coronavirus your stories. Philippa thomas hears from people around the world about their extraordinary experiences during the pandemic and how covid 19 has changed their lives. Welcome to coronavirus your stories, a programme about how covid 19 changes lives around the world. I am Philippa Thomas and this week we revisit some of the most powerful stories we have shared with you over the last 1a weeks. We will find out what happened to the sailing family who self isolated for months on an uninhabited island in the bahamas. Hurricane season was starting and they were preparing to leave. We will talk to a leading lung expert in spain who caught the virus while treating covid 19 victims. She is now dealing with new outbreaks. Well start with two covid survivors who each spent weeks on ventilators in intensive care. We brought together Brendan Sheridan, in West Yorkshire and Brett Breslow, spending his last day at a Rehabilitation Centre in philadelphia to hear some of what they had been through. Between the time i was in the coma and the time that i was too dizzy to get up out of bed it was about five weeks and my body was so deconditioned that my legs would shake and i would lose my breath easily. Now i am able to walk about the length of a football field, so that has gotten a lot better. My kidneys have not recovered yet. We are still hopeful but we are talking about converting me from acute to chronic kidney failure here in the next couple of weeks if we do not see better results, and what that might mean. Brendan, i know you will sympathise with just how hard it is to get back on your feet and get going but we have also spoken about the mental scars. I know it is difficult sleeping and you get flashbacks, dont you . And they tend to be getting worse as the week has gone. I have a about 16 hours sleep in two weeks. I am constantly waking up as if i am suffocating and still in hospital and then not being able to get my breath while im in bed which makes me panic. The other flashbacks are obviously because of how fast it happened. I couldnt. I have flashbacks of saying not saying goodbye to my kids and my family and telling them that i love them, if that was the case that i was not going to be around anymore. We know that brett and brendans stories touched many of our viewers and ii weeks later we brought them together again. I am really pleased to welcome back Brendan Sheridan and Brett Breslow to the programme. Brendan, first, how are you doing . Physically ok but i still struggle with sleep and the ptsd side of things and flashbacks, but other than that, just a day at a time. Brett, in newjersey, how has it been for you . Mostly physically recovered. I am still going to physical therapy for this drop foot issue that i still have. It is slow going but it is coming back. They say, you know, it could be a while and could take up to one year potentially to fully recover there, but there is hope that we will fully recover. In physical therapy were also continuing to work on my conditioning, my lungs and my heart rate recovery. So physically i am ok. Emotionally i am doing great. I dont have any of those ptsd related issues from the experience that brendan has mentioned. Brett, when we first spoke to you and interviewed you on the programme it was your last day in a hospital bed. You were in a rehab centre. Tell us about your homecoming. It was amazing. My wife was insistent on coming to visit with me in the Rehabilitation Hospital and i introduced her to all the people who helped me get to where i was that day and she stuck me in the car and she drove me home and it was an amazing ride home. The next day she dragged me outside and said we were going for a walk and there were 100 cars lined up to greet me and say hello. It was an amazing experience. Brendan, you spoke about the fact that you still get flashbacks and that it is hard to sleep. It is very hard. I didnt expect. I have been doing my one to one counselling and that has been really good but the ptsd seems to be a problem for me at the moment, and sleep deprivation and things like that but the next bout of therapy they will be activating is psychotherapy, edr, that is eye movement and desensitisation and reprocessing which is lights and accessing the brain through Different Things and anything to do with trauma which i think has helped with ptsd with soldiers and things like that so any course of therapy will be good to try and shift these sleepless nights and flashbacks. Viewers may think it is tough for us to put you through this conversation and i wanted to ask you about the impact of having spoken to the bbc, spoken to the public about your illness and how hard it is to recover. Physical recovery, obviously helps, looking better, but scratch away at the surface however and it is still an ongoing fight. You have good days and then you have really bad days where you just do not want to get out of bed and you cannot force yourself to wake up and that may be due to sleep deprivation orjust being so down in general afteralmost, like i said, coming close to death. The main thing for me was not going to be able to say goodbye to my family, my children and my loved ones and that really gets me when it does that. Brett, what do you think about what hearing what brendan is going through or gone through . Obviously coronavirus has hit you both differently. I would like to respond to brendan and say hey, buddy, they tied me into a therapist the moment i woke up and my wife has a therapy background as well and there is no shame in that. Keep talking. You will be ok and you will get through it. There are things you can control in this life and then there is everything else, and as long as you are controlling the things you can control you will be ok. So keep talking. Brett, in terms of your treatment, when we first spoke you were talking about kidney dialysis, even the possibility of having to go on the transplant list. What has happened in terms of your treatment . With covid i9, so much is experimental. One of the doctors in the rehabilitation facility i was in discovered a setting that was off in my white blood cell count and he came in one day and said you know, it is kind of a hail mary, i am not sure what is going on but you have this one weird inflammation marker and were going to start you on an anti inflammatory called prednisone. And it was within a day or two you could see the changes in my body, the urine output, my creatine level started to drop and within three days they told me i no longer needed dialysis. From both of you, i am hearing about the long process of recovery and perhaps for brett it is more physical and for brendan more about mental health. I want to ask you what you would like our audience to take away from this conversation about the fact that covid does not come and go, it does linger. Brendan. There is not a day that goes by that i dont think about the situation i was in and, not only that, the guilt of making it through when tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of people across the world have not. Probably with fewer symptoms than me and brett. And that is scarring in itself, that little bit of guilt. Brett, what do you think people watching need to know about covid i9 . The road to recovery is also different, as you hear today with brendan and i, and i think that what people need to really understand is that just because somebody has been released from the hospital, does not mean that they are not still working through those issues. It means they are well enough to be out of hospital but there may be, you know, some lingering effects and those things may be with them for one week or one month or a year. Brendan sheridan and Brett Breslow sharing the experience of their long recovery from covid i9. Next, the doctors story. At the end ofjune we spoke to Eva Polverino in spain. She was treating Covid Patients at a hospital in barcelona when she caught the virus herself. And she told us something about the trauma being experienced by many frontline medics. Most of us have some kind of trauma with this. There is a generalfeeling of frustration and it is difficult to manage the fact that you have to think of yourself, not only your patients. As a doctor you are constantly concentrate on patients. Did you let yourself cry . Oh, idid. And i am happy i did because i really needed it. And i am sure that possibly almost all of my colleagues also did because you need to do it. It is a relief. You need it. Because the stress is incredible. You are working, thinking of the disease every day, all the time you are awake. Since we spoke to dr polverino, spain has experienced more than 100 new outbreaks and this time she says, different groups are being affected. I would say in this second wave, younger people are more at risk of getting sick because of their social life mostly. They seem to be tired of lockdown and are starting to relax and enjoy social life. We do see a lot of outbreaks there. But also, as more communities like farms and plantations and holiday camps, you know. And eva, how do you feel because when we first spoke to you, you were not only working non stop on the front line, you caught covid 19 yourself. You had a difficult time. I had and i still have, i would say, its not an easy situation, particularly because we are really tired mentally and emotionally tired of this situation. It has been a very long time for us. Even one week become such a long time, you perceive it as a very long time when you are so stressed. And we are a bit more prepared as healthcare professionals, i mean, to cope with this infection. Lung specialist Eva Polverino. Youre watching coronavirus your stories, a program how covid 19 is changing lives around the world. I am Philippa Thomas and this week we are revisiting stories, including the amazing journey that one family made to reach safe harbour. American and swedish couple brian and Karin Trautman have been sailing the world for years, now with a baby on board. We first saw them on an uninhabited island in the bahamas where they had been living for more than 100 days. We are out here at an island that is completely uninhabited. There are no stores, no people, no city. Just us and the ocean and a few other boats. And you are managing with a baby who i think is going to be 10 months old this week. How are you surviving . Yes, she is actually going to be 10 months old in three days but i feel like we are doing quite well, were feeling very fortunate to be out here. Its a beautiful place and were normally set up on the boat to be self sufficient for months at a time and so we are able to make our own electricity with sun and wind. We can make our own water with the desalination plant. We can make our own alcohol with the still we have on board. So were pretty well set up to be out here and we are just taking it day by day and month by month. Food, we catch our own food a lot here. Brian is able to go spearfishing. When the lobster season was in full swing, we did that. That stopped about a month ago. Having a baby on board, we think about things differently, right. It has changed the way that we feel like we want to be, a little bit extra safe and move north fairly soon as we have heard that there might be a pretty bad year for hurricanes. Island life obviously work for them but with Hurricane Season approaching, soon after we spoke, they decided to sail on to the state of maine in the far north east of usa. We left the bahamas, when was it . Injune, the middle ofjune, for fear of the hurricane is approaching and the storms and the weather that was changing. We were rounding the cape of hatteras which was pretty well known, it was known as the graveyard of the atlantic along the virginia coast as you approach maryland. We got hit by a big low coming over us and we saw winds in excess of 35 knots and we were in the gulf stream. It created these gigantic standing waves and the boat was shaking and getting slammed around and the wind was howling. We blew up a sail, sierra couldnt really come outside because the weather was just too horrid. It was like that for about three days. But then, we made it and just as we were actually arriving into shore, we were about 20 miles off the coast of Virginia Beach and we got called on the radio by somebody actually standing on the beach and they basically said, hey, ive been tracking you guys. Tracking you on your satellite tracker. I know youre arriving in the us and i would like to offer you a safe harbour or a safe dock to pull into. He guided us in, helped us tie up and gave us a coronavirus survival kit with gloves and masks and sanitiser and then he gave us the keys to his car and a 100 bill and said go and get yourself some take out food because i know you have been out in the middle of nowhere for a long time. And it was probably the most amazing welcome back to the us you could ever think of. It was super friendly. The kindness of strangers. Yeah, absolutely. And we were quite nervous about coming back to the us. We had been isolated in the bahamas for about 120 days at that point and just coming back to civilisation and everything that is going on in the us was pretty scary. So to get that welcome was very, kind of, very humbling. And tell us something about, i can hear sierra, tell us a little bit about her transition. I guess first of all you had to hold onto her during some of that journey. That sail taught me a lot, also about my limits and what i feel comfortable with. We have been out sailing for 10 years but sailing with her is definitely different and i think her biggest thing is that she gets extremely bored. The bed was leaning over like this, we were at such an angle that she was trying to climb up and would get pushed back, pushed back and she got so frustrated. She was screaming. And you know, having that stress and i still had to feed her, still have to change her diapers and stuff. And i want her to be comfortable. I think after one day, that was my breaking point at one bit, i was like, brian, i hate this. And he was like, i know. I hate it too, but it will be over soon. But we did it and it was fine. And i think the other thing since we last spoke, sierra has turned one and the changes in her are remarkable. She is so much more aware, she is actually walking now. So, you know, she can climb up the stairs and get outside on her own. She is walking running from place to place. It was a lot easier to watch her when she couldnt do that, when she could only crawl. And then as youre making your way north to where you are now, youre going past some amazing landmarks. I guess, do you go right past the statue of liberty . Yeah, we actually went right through new york city, right through the centre down the east river and right past the statue of liberty. It was such a surreal experience because it is such a landmark, such an amazing place and it is closed. You never think about the statue of liberty being closed. We were there on a typical weekday. We sailed the boat right up to it. We took time to pose for a selfie on the foredeck with the statue in the background and there was nobody there. Itjust had this eerie kind of vacant feeling. For us, it was actually very, very amazing experience. And what has the adjustment been like coming from an uninhabited island in the bahamas to one of the coronavirus global hotspots . One of the reasons we decided to come up to maine is because it is one of the states with a lesser population density and it doesnt really have that many cases and the people tend to live quite far apart. So its almost like doing the same thing we were doing in the bahamas, now we just have sweaters on and pine trees and there are bald eagles flying around, which is absolutely incredible. So we are doing a bit of birdwatching and definitely enjoying the cooler climate and were not sweating much. And brian, you are american, in terms of wider family, are you able to see your relatives . Not really. Unfortunately, my mum and my grandma have both tested positive for covid now. They both got it in the hospital where they live in orlando, florida. They are both isolated and so, you know, none of my family that still lives in florida can see them. And it is a very, very difficult situation because they are older and not healthy to begin with so they are in a high risk. It is terrible to think that your family is sitting there suffering and there is absolutely nothing that can be done about it. That is hard and it is part of the uncertainty isnt it that so many people are feeling right now. I want to finish this conversation by asking you what you think comes next. You have spent all of these years out there sailing the world, do you have any idea of the next stage . I have no idea what our plans are. We just going to have to take it week by week, month to month. And eventually it is going to get really cold up here. We are far enough north now that it freezes and we wouldnt be able to live on the boat in those sort of conditions. And so, we will either have to leave the boat and try to find somewhere else to live or we will sail south again and try and find someplace that will let us go. Seafarers brian, karin and sierra trautman ending this edition with catching up on some of the personal stories of how covid 19 is changing lives around the world. I am Philippa Thomas and thank you for watching coronavirus your stories. Hello there. The weather is set to change this weekend, but theres no sign of summer returning. The last 2a hours, its been very wet across many parts of the country. Some flooded scenes here in southern england, with an inch of rain falling in about an hour. There could be some flooding in northeast england in the morning as well with that persistent rain from overnight. That rain band will move southwards through the day, heading towards wales and the midlands. South of that, some sunshine triggering some heavy and thundery showers. The weather should improve for Northern Ireland and scotland, and later in northern england, with some sunshine. But for these areas, the winds will be much stronger, particularly windy around some of those north sea coasts, maybe blowing in one or two showers as well. A disappointingly cool day on friday. Again, temperatures 15 to 18 degrees. Now, the really wet weather that were seeing across england and wales into friday is around that area of low pressure and weather front. Its trying to pull away on saturday, getting nudged by this area of High Pressure in the atlantic, but with that sort of set up, were left with a northerly wind on saturday. Indeed, right the way through the weekend, a Bank Holiday Weekend for many, its going to be quite chilly, and its going to be cold at night as well. A lot of dry weather around and, after a windy day on saturday, the winds will be much lighter. But weve got those northerly winds on saturday, making it feel chilly. Some sunshine around. We will see some showers, especially across northern scotland, and theres still the threat of some rain coming back towards lincolnshire and east anglia in particular. And it will be windy, especially in the morning, with the strongest winds down those north sea coasts of england. For a while, could be gusting 50 miles an hour. That, of course, will make it feel much colder, and those temperatures are below average for this time of year, 15 17 degrees. And once we see the winds dropping overnight and the cloud melting away, were going to find those temperatures will fall sharply. A really cold night for the time of year on saturday night, worth bearing in mind if youre going to be out and about perhaps camping, for example. As we head into sunday and monday, this area of High Pressure then moves across the uk, so the winds will fall much lighter. Weve got a weather front arriving towards Northern Ireland by the end of monday, but ahead of that, a lot of dry weather. A little bit of sunshine from time to time, lighter winds, but those temperatures arent really going to change a great deal. And before then, of course, weve got more wet, perhaps windy weather on friday. Welcome to bbc news. Im james reynolds. Our top stories getting ready for the grand finale President Trump prepares for one of the biggest speeches of his career, as he tries to win a second term in the white house. Cutting its way across america hurricane laura strikes the louisiana coast, the biggest storm to hit the state in over 100 years. Us sport takes a stand over race and police brutality. Players boycott basketball, baseball, soccer and tennis, in protest at the shooting of jacob blake. And the Manchester United captain Harry Maguire speaks for the first time about the brawl in greece that landed him in court