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Now that I'm past the preparatory dread, the stress of 2-rooms-2-people isolation, the panic of the peak, and the stress of a house move, I feel like I'm coming out of a tunnel into a (slightly) brighter, calmer world. Hello, world. It's nice to have a bit of mental space again.
Those of us working in hospitals knew what was coming a little bit sooner than the rest of the country. The rank and file didn't have access to any special information, but we could process the reality of that vague threat in China, in Italy, more easily than most.
We knew what those initially small numbers would actually look like in our waiting rooms, wards, units. We knew how close to breaking point our services already were. I think everyone in the NHS had a moderate to severe case of foreboding from mid Feb onwards.
We started to see cases of COVID-19 in our hospitals before we had adequate PPE available and procedures in place. That phase was hard. Every time you met a patient there was an element of fear, especially for those of us with one of the "underlying health conditions".
All of us found our own ways to put that fear out of our minds. Rationalisation, denial, humour, routine. We reduced the fear to a rumbling anxiety, a monster we could manage. It helped that the world outside was barely even at the anxiety stage, tense, but not terrified.
