Covid-19: Grandmother Tina Cassaniti reveals fight with Delta

Sydney grandmother Tina Cassaniti has woken from a medically-induced coma after 22 days, urging others to get vaccinated as soon as they can.

A terrified grandmother battling Covid has woken from a 22-day coma to ask her intensive care doctor: “What happened, was I in a car crash?”

Mother of three Tina Cassaniti, 72, has only recently regained consciousness at Sydney’s Royal Prince Alfred Hospital and is attached to a ventilator.

With no recollection of her exhaustive fight with the Delta variant, she said: “All I remember is being in an ambulance and giving the paramedic my Medicare card.

“When I woke up in ICU, I thought I was paralysed, I couldn’t feel my arms and legs and couldn’t talk — the doctors said I was lucky to be alive — I was so starved of oxygen that if I hadn’t come round they wouldn't have revived me as the damage to my heart would have been too great.

Grandmother Tina Cassaniti has woken from a 22-day coma after fighting Covid at Royal Prince Alfred Hospital

“I didn’t know this at the time, I was in a medically induced coma.

“I’ve never been in so much pain and so scared before.

“I’ve regained the use of speech again and my muscles were so diminished I can’t walk but I will with the help of physiotherapists.

“It felt a thousand times worse than being in a car crash.”

The retired driving instructor has spoken from her hospital bed determined to recount her agonising plight in a bid to encourage sceptical Australians to register for the Covid vaccine.

Tina Cassaniti is now able to video call children Damian and Chantelle Cassaniti.

Tina Cassaniti, from Five Dock.

Ms Cassaniti was four weeks away from her booked appointment to receive the AstraZeneca vaccine when she caught the Delta strain at a birthday party for a teenage family member at the Crossways Hotel in Strathfield South on June 23.

The night of June 23 is the date the infection is believed to have started to spread at the hotel.

NSW Health did not list the venue as a known Covid exposure site until four days later instead wrongly alerting an outbreak at the Crossroads Hotel in Casula, Liverpool.

Four days later, Mrs Cassaniti, who suffers from asthma, began to feel weak and nauseous.

A Covid swab at a Haberfield testing centre returned a positive result on July 27.

“I was scared, I didn’t understand how I caught it because I haven’t left the house for 18 months doing all my food shopping in line, how did it get me?” she said.

Grandmother of three Tina Cassaniti has urged vaccine sceptics to get jabbed after she was hospitalised with the Delta strain for eight week.

Nurses at RPA had been checking her breathing and heart rate remotely using wireless monitors.

When her fever spiked to more than 40C a doctor made the call to rush her to hospital by ambulance.

With the Delta variant attacking her lungs, she was sedated and placed in a medically induced coma to allow her body to fight the illness.

When she was weaned off sedation over the period of one week, a surgeon cut a hole in her throat, inserting a tracheotomy tube to compensate for her weakened respiratory muscles.

She woke from her coma three weeks ago and on Friday finally tested negative to the virus for the first time in two months.

Ms Cassaniti remains in hospital with a seriously compromised immune system and relies on liquids administered through a feeding tube for food. Four other members of her family, including a 19 year old, were all struck by the virus after the birthday party.

“I had a tube as big as my thumb in my neck to keep me breathing, they say I’ve come back from the brink of death, I thank God and my children and their prayers and the doctors and nurses for keeping me alive,” she said.

Tina Cassaniti is urging sceptics to get the Covid jab.

“The thing that kept me going is I want to see my daughter get married and I’m waiting for her boyfriend to propose.

“I want to be at my girl’s wedding.

“People need to understand Covid is real and it hurts like hell, the aches and fevers; it’s like a bad flu times one hundred,” she said.

Speaking directly to vaccine sceptics, she said, “Get the Covid jab, you don’t want to go through what I went through.”