Sporting events, bars and restaurants full of life. And in Flavill’s home country that day, the front pages of the newspapers did not address the spreading disease, but in Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s announcement that he and his fiancée were expecting a child.
Weeks later, the world had stopped. But everything that has happened since March 1 has gone through Flavill, even though he took Covid-19 while he was unconscious.
Now, the teenager has begun to emerge from a ten-month coma, exalting his family but confronting them with a new question: How do you explain a year like no other?
“When you get out of this, life won’t be the way it knows it,” Flavill’s aunt Kate Yarbo told CNN. “How do you describe it?
“I think it’s going to be a shock. We’re all still processing it; I’m not sure you can ever describe how this pandemic feels.”
The family ordeal began a few days before the rapid onslaught of cancellations, fatalities and closures.
Flavill, a fan of cricket and hockey, was preparing to visit Buckingham Palace in May to collect the Duke of Edinburgh’s youth achievement award. But a collision with a car left him with a traumatic brain injury in the back of his head and he was quickly taken to a hospital in Leicester, in central England.
Her mother is still waiting until she can safely touch her son, who is now recovering in a nursing home.
The pandemic has drastically affected Flavill’s hospital care, but it is unclear whether he has understood his family’s explanations as to why.
“How scary is it to have (have nurses) on PPE when you don’t understand what’s going on?” Yarbo asked.
“He will only ever understand it through our ability to describe it and through news. The horror,” he said. “So many people have said it’s like sitting down to watch a science fiction movie, right? You couldn’t write the pandemic as a movie.”
“This is exactly what will happen to Joseph … without ever having to go through the fear and emotion we all had, so that when you’re looking at it afterwards, hopefully, a lot of fear goes away.”
“You want to take his hand”
“He’s had such great pain, he’s had seizures, it’s been a horrible traumatic journey for him,” Yarbo said. And then, in the last days and weeks, a breakthrough came.
First, Flavill smiled as the audio recorded in a cockpit was played. Then came a Zoom call with his aunt. “I was joking with him that one day he might be able to talk and he remembered our holiday in Cornwall. I said, ‘Will you promise me that your first word will be pasty?’ “Yarbo said, referring to the famous Cornish Patisserie.” And then he blinked. “
“Something just turned on my belly. I said, ‘Did you blink on purpose?’ “and blinked twice. Then we knew he was communicating.”
Since then, his progress has been rapid.
“The last week has been amazing,” Yarbo said. “He can’t talk yet, but it’s clear he’s starting to control his limbs, and his sense of humor is there, he’s starting to laugh at jokes.”
“We’re all really blown away. It’s amazing what the brain can do.”
Flavill caught Covid-19 while in a coma, which has prevented him from receiving a vaccine, but he will soon be able to opt for a punch, his aunt says.
His family has also debated how to talk to him about the news of the last ten months, once he is able to understand them.
“Personal feelings will guide us: did you know we weren’t there?” she said. “This is an important thing that his mother can manage emotionally, watching him through a screen. You want to hold his hand, you want to be there all the time.”
Flavill will be one of the few adults in the Western world to know about the second-hand pandemic. But he will also know how far his family and friends went to communicate with him again.
Her mother, Sharon, has received audio and video clips of people who wanted to play them for her son, some of whom may have contributed to her progress, her aunt says.
And the family says it has another goal: to raise awareness about the impact of traumatic brain injury.
“What happens to Joe is that he’s always been such a great energy force. He’s the most determined person,” Yarbo said. “Who knows how far he will go now.”