sharing our air

Saturday 3rd April 2020:

I'm loving the opportunity to have some time at home with my husband, and enjoy our permitted hour in the great outdoors.  He has been running or cycling each day, and today I cycle alongside the 10 miles that he is running! To feel the air in my lungs reminds me of how lucky we are to be here, to be well, to be exercising, to be alive.  It has been hard being at arms length from him-whilst I've been working I've been so cautious not to kiss him! I have moved him to another bathroom in the  house, and I keep doing all I can to prevent entry of the virus to our home space-I take my work clothes off at the front door, they go into the washing machine at 60 degrees, and I go straight to the shower and wash my hair every day that I've been at work.  And I've been doing this before the respiratory consultant told us that she has been doing the same.  It seems a new revelation to many of my colleagues.  I really haven't been taking risks!  

We come home to messages that my hospital has declared a critical incident and closed a&e to all patients. It makes the national news. My hunch is that it is as the resp consultant said to us  on Thursday-that oxygen supply was running low. Who knew they could.  But in a crisis caused by a virus which overwhlems the respiratory system, and in the numbers that it is affecting, and the time it takes to progress with these patients, this isn't actually surprising.  It turns out that this was indeed the case, but they managed to replenish safe supplies and reopen the a&e by that night.  All patients in the hospital had safe amounts of oxygen available to them, but to remain that way the had to divert any new demand on it.  Unprecedented-never have I heard or used this word so many times.  But the decisions being made in our hospitals all over the world are at a level most of us may not be able to imagine. 

The Nightingale Hospital officially opens at London't Excel Centre.  4000 beds for covid patients has been built in just 9 days, a phenomenal effort with the help of some 200 soldiers.  Who knew that this could be done. I had doubted anything like this could happen when I saw how they did the same in China.  A great use of an empty shell of a building,  but I look at the scale, and the equipment, and the strained staffing levels in our busy hospitals, and wonder if and how much it will be used.  I hope that the good planning is only in anticipation, and that this vast hospital doesn't come into use.  And if it doesn' then what of all the equipment getting dusty? Hopefully it will get to where it is most needed, even if it doesn't turn out to be the Nightingale.  Still an overwhelming effort.