Five years ago, the NHS shut down. Does anyone else remember?

[Kennobi]

Because I do.

In fact I have several quite specific memories from that time. The time when we were all supposed to "stay the fuck at home", "protect our NHS" and read that fucking kitty O'Meara poem.

I shall share those memories with you here. Please add any similar.

1. My good work friend, a young man in his twenties, realised his flatmate had covid and was struggling to breathe. He dialled 999 and the operator talked him through how to find and use the nearest defibrillator, at the co op shop, half a mile from his house. No, they weren't sending an ambulance and yes he was required to activate a defibrillator, on remote instruction, for a woman who wasn't his wife, or sister, or child and as far as the NHS was concerned that was it, job done, they wouldn't be sending medics to an address where there was covid in case they caught it.

1. My cousin, a man in his fifties, caught covid. My auntie repeatedly rang for emergency assistance as his lips were turning blue, was told to monitor him each time, he died.

1. My best friend caught it, again struggling to breathe, they asked her can you breathe? No. Are your lips blue? Yes. Are you able to watch a TV programme for five minutes (ie basically are you conscious)? Yes. Ok fine you can maybe see a doctor tomorrow. Saw a GP in a car park, wearing a mask, who confirmed she wasn't dead, and sent her on her way. She now has long covid and it doesn't look like she'll ever get her life back.

It seems to me that at the time we most needed our health system it was unavailable to us.

Do others have similar stories?

Absolutely this. All the covid minimisers forget what it was like in the early days.

Yes I remember being redeployed from an outpatients department and being pretty scared of what was to come. We had limited information about the virus at the beginning, with the wisdom of hindsight I'm sure things could have been a lot different.

Working on the overwhelmed covid wards, the respiratory admissions units were full and there were new intensive care wards popping up all over the hospital full of COVID patients, I'd never seen anything like it. I remember being scared realising that a lot of patients in intensive care were in their 30's and 40's, same age as me. Nobody really knew what made some people so vulnerable and others asymptomatic. The PPE requirements were changing daily as PPE ran out and we had to make do with what was available to us at the time.

The rest of the hospital and corridors were eerily quiet, aside from the COVID sections.

But you ‘falling for it’ or not would have made zero difference to the things you’ve listed?

Was this on the news? This is huge and I can't remember it happening 😭

How awful though - December 2020 was not the right time to be going away

I don't like him anymore anyway 😭 even if he was the most interesting part of gmb

His weird obsession with meghan markle needs to end

I remember. I had suspected appendicitis at the end of March 2020. My other half had to drive me to hospital in the middle of the night as ambulance refused to come and I was in a lot of pain. We had to leave our kids then 13 and 11 home alone. (I was screaming in agony and didn’t want them to freak out totally. So my partner woke up the eldest and told her what was happening. He literally dropped me at A&E and then went home (25 minutes out of the house max but my kids were freaked out nonetheless). My doctor that saw me wasn’t sure about operating as it might not be appendix (in women 1 in 2 gets taken out when there’s no appendix issue due to all the gubbins being around same area). But I had visions of dying on on trolley of appendicitis whilst the hospital got overrun by Covid patients. In the end they did operate on me (there was a last minute argument as to whether I should be in the Covid clean operating room or not as I had fever etc, which was not fun: literally got stopped in the corridor outside operating room where a whole heated discussion took place between two nurses). They couldn’t do keyhole surgery so had to have the big scar. Then they tried to send me home the same day with a box of paracetamol. Which I strongly declined. I insisted they give me decent pain meds before I let myself be discharged and they went from paracetamol to liquid morphine but then I had to go. I had to isolate at home to stop potential Covid infection after being in hospital. It was a total nightmare but the doctors and nurses caring for me were pretty great. It all feels very unreal now that time…

What happened is triage. The NHS does this daily. The impact is never usually on this scale. What we experienced is what nearly every other generation who lived on this planet experienced during a pandemic.

I think people truly have not read enough history. Do you know how many died in Spanish Flu pandemic? COVID wasn’t that far removed from that experience including the desire to forget it afterwards.

I agree that the parameters for care and the way in which care and medical assistance was provided changed during covid. No one would argue with you.
But to say the hospitals were not overwhelmed is mental.

I bolded it in the post that you linked @itsnotalwaysthateasy said it
And @WinterBones said ppl going out was why she caught Covid
So where were the public supossed to go exactly.

i never mentioned anything about lockdown. i didn't catch covid until may 2021 for the first time.. when people WERE still testing and WERE still supposed to stay home/away from people if they were positive.. but people didn't, because they're assholes.

I’m sorry you had such horrible experiences. It really was unprecedented and as a paramedic, many of my friends gave up months of their lives, stayed away from their families for weeks and months on end to try and help and do what they could.

many people worked their arses off but triage is a thing. It didn’t always work, but unfortunately, there were people more in need, as shit as it is.

you do need to get some counselling. And you need to understand that people have different experiences from you but they’re no less valid.

No OP.
You're the only one that remembers or has horrible stories.

Yes, I remember 5 years ago being a newly qualified ODP and being sat at home on my arse because the NHS had shut down, and not running around daily in hot and sweaty PPE, working in theatres caring for sick people and being redeployed into ITU. What a time.

I found a breast lump two weeks after the first lockdown started in April 2020. Rang GP who saw me within the hour. Told me it was a lump to be worried about and a consultant would call me within the next 24 hours. They called me 3 hours later to discuss my health issues( I have a rare auto immune disease and am extremely Immune suppressed). After the phone call I was invited to a breast clinic the following day.

I attended the clinic alone ( which was hard) but had a mammogram, ultrasound and biopsy in same day. It was confirmed I had cancer and needed to come back the following week for biopsy results.

The following week I was told I had stage 3 breast cancer and I needed a lumpectomy. Because I was so immune suppressed, it was decided that chemo would be too dangerous, but I would have intensive radiotherapy every day for 4 weeks.

I had the surgery as a day patient( again which was hard)two weeks later and began the radiotherapy 6 weeks after that.
I attended a packed regional centre for cancer care every day for 4 weeks. There were people of all ages with all different kinds of treatment plans, and I had a fantastic specialist team. After the radiotherapy I developed 3rd degree burns and permanent lung damage, but had access to a specialist nurse, Oncologist and consultant at all times.

My point is this. Having cancer alone with no one to hold your hand or give you any support was VERY hard. I was very scared and it took a huge toll on me mentally. My dad had just died 3 weeks previous to my diagnosis and my husband lost his job due to Covid. I was the sole breadwinner for the family and had to return to work way before I was ready, but WFH made that possible. The NHS were incredible. They did everything possible to keep me safe, fight for my life and support me. In no way, shape or form did they shut down for me or any of the other hundreds of patients I saw in the busy city centre hospital every day for weeks at the height of the pandemic.

The NHS didn't shut down. At the time I found a lump on my breast and had the most excellent care and after care. (The lump was benign). I find your title extremely insulting and disingenuous.

I don't actually recall. It didn't actually close like op suggests though did it?

😥

If the nhs wasn’t overwhelmed why were myself and other midwife colleagues sent to go and work as nurses on the general side (covid ward) when we have never trained or qualified as nurses? Maybe because the hospital was overwhelmed and too many patients and not entirely staff (due to sickness and actual nurses being redeployed to ICU, etc). It normally wouldn’t be allowed at all. IIRC there was discussion about getting vets to come and work on the wards at one point!

I was working in a DGH. Our intensive care (usually 19 ventilated beds) was ventilating 89 patients. My colleague was admitted to intensive care for 3 weeks (after feeling obliged to see a patient who had been visiting ill family members with confirmed COVID daily, felt unwell themselves and brought themselves to a non urgent appointment).
Hospitals were SO close to the edge - so many people were requiring oxygen that we were close to losing piped oxygen because the pressures couldn’t be maintained.

The Jan was in my experience much worse - it took me 35 mins to get into the hospital car park around the private ambulances delivering bodies to the fridges occupying the local school playing field.

@JenniferBooth , @itsnotalwaysthateasy wasn’t moaning, she was pointing out the huge difference between her experience of that period and that of people that didn’t have the same responsibilities placed on their shoulders because of their job. Perfectly valid and required nothing from you personally although it would be nice to think most people would appreciate those who had those skills used them.

@WinterBones has already clarified further herself but I can’t blame her for still feeling sore about it given that by 2021 there was a loud contribution from people declaring they were done/never started and they would carry on doing whatever they wanted to virus or not. If speeding car had hit me and robbed me of the use of one of my legs I think I’d be understandably still angry at people who speed.

IIRC there was discussion about getting vets to come and work on the wards at one point!

I remember that. Tbf my vet is lovely and I’d have been happy to see her!

DH worked on a Covid ward - he still won’t talk about much of it other than the frantic trying to treat more critically ill and dying patients than they had capacity for and the ongoing converting of space into additional Covid wards. He did more death certificates then than he had during the other 30 years of his medical career.

It certainly wasn't there for my family during the pandemic, I know that much.

I am “frontline” NHS staff. Never once refused to treat someone. Nor did any of my colleagues, including the ones that died when they contracted it looking after COVID positive patients. If anything I worked probably double my usual hours to treat as many people as possible. It just wasn’t enough as there were too many to treat and not enough staff/beds.

And you know what- we do talk about. Quite often amongst ourselves. We talk about how horrific it was to be in the situation of not seemingly be able to treat everyone and watch people die on a scale we have never witnessed before. We talk about it all the time as we will never shake what it did to us.

Weird, I worked for the ambulance service all the way through COVID and I don't recall us shutting down. I remember panicking about sending my 5 year old into school hubs as a key worker because I was worried what she'd catch and come home with. I remember coming home from work one evening during "the clap" and just wanting to keep my head down and get inside because I was exhausted. I remember hearing a colleague receive their final "stand down" from dispatch after their death from COVID.

We asked additional questions to monitor infection risk, and told people to take additional precautions before the ambulance arrived (ensuring everyone was wearing masks etc), but everyone who would have gotten an ambulance response before COVID got one during COVID.

DH, a doctor working on a Covid ward was exposed along with all his colleagues every day, with minimal PPE. They were overwhelmed with critically ill patients whilst trying desperately to save as many lives as possible.