The are a number of stand out moments for me throughout this pandemic but two in particular will always stay with me and the first happened the morning after Boris Johnson declared the schools should all close (so the first day of the first lockdown) and that people should work from home if at all possible.
I work in a hospital and so had no choice but to go to work. I will always remember my cycle into work on that first morning. I’d left my children at home with my husband, the roads were eerily empty, very few cars, no kids walking to school, not even the usual dog walkers. I remember feeling really terrified and every fibre of my being was screaming out to turn round and go home where it was ‘safe’. At this point, we actually had very few Covid patients in the hospital but that morning I felt like I was cycling towards a certain death (I realise this sounds melodramatic, and I’m not normally like this, but there was so much fear in this first days and I was completely caught up in it).
Time went on, and whilst I could never totally shake off this sense of doom and still felt the daily worry of putting me and my family at risk, it all became more manageable. However, my second stand out moment came during the second wave of the pandemic, when our hospital was completely overwhelmed by Covid patients and I was assigned to work on the Covid wards. I was wearing the standard PPE for a general Covid ward (surgical mask, visor, gloves and apron) and was assisting a patient to get out of bed, my face close to hers, when she coughed and spluttered over me. I remember thinking, this PPE is not adequate, my mask is gaping and I think I will contract Covid from this patient. Sure enough, a week later, I developed symptoms, came down with the virus and subsequently infected my family with it, despite my best efforts to isolate from them (none of us got too poorly with it, and I was back at work within 2 weeks).
Of course there are many more moments that sum up the pandemic such as empty supermarket shelves, zoom chats with friends who live a few doors away, home-schooling angst, to name a few, but the two described above capture my experience of being a health worker in the pandemic and I don’t think I’ll ever forget them.