In Episode 24 of his new book, author Julian Roup visits a Covid-19 ward through the eyes of a nurse and watches a man die.
In case you missed Episode 23, click here.
Life in a Time of Plague
Sussex, 30th April 2020
By Julian Roup
Seven weeks in lock down does strange things to your mind. Even though we can hardly complain of cabin fever, I have started to think of things I would like to do and places to go when this mad time is over.
I have two stents in my heart and should be good for some years, though that could change in a heartbeat, not to put too fine a point on it. If I got coronavirus, there would be little chance of my surviving it. So in these past weeks of peace and creativity, each day has been a reprieve from the Grim Reaper, and all the sweeter for that. Near on 43,000 people in the UK have died to date, while I have been given the gift of continued life. And that does something to you.
It has helped me to prioritise, for one thing. And I am beginning to think that if I do survive this pandemic, I would like to do something of a lap around my old and most beloved haunts, to walk in those landscapes that have meant the most to me. To say thank you to the gods for sparing me in those places that have entered my soul and my heart for that matter, though that has become a somewhat crowded space.
As I lay in bed these last few nights of April, my mind has taken me out of this 240-year-old cottage for a mental Cook’s Tour of my special places across Europe and southward to South Africa and the Cape.
In Europe, there are two destinations, France and Greece, that matter most to me. I am sure that I am not alone in this urge to travel again. The punch-drunk airlines are going to be overwhelmed with travellers with new life-work balance priorities, heading for the Mediterranean when all this is over. And for me, that means the Greek islands.
Everyone has their favourite Greek island. Ours is Skopelos. In the mid 1980s, we started to explore our new continent and fell in love with the Greek islands. It’s not hard to do. And with us, it was love at first sight. The heat, the quality of the light and on Skopelos, that combination of green trees and turquoise sea, takes your breath away. Skopelos phonetically translated into my mother-tongue, Afrikaans, means to kick free. Indeed, the name proved prophetic.
We returned, year on year; eventually we brought our children to the island and Skopelos found a place in our family narrative. Today its food informs our cooking, its sunshine and beauty inhabits our hearts and memories. It lies there at the top of the Aegean, waiting still, as it has through history – an emerald set in a sapphire sea. And we know that one day we will return, no longer young, somewhat hurt by life, and less romantic, and the island will beguile us again, for it is all it ever was, but now it is also family, part of us.
If I make it through the pandemic, I intend to walk and swim once more from the beaches of Skopelos, the perfect place to celebrate life.
Yesterday it was announced with some fanfare that Boris has become a father for the sixth time (we think; there may be others we don’t know of yet). His fiancée, Carrie Symonds, produced a boy. Jacob Rees Mogg, the ‘MP for the 18th Century’ as he is known, compliments Boris for joining that most exclusive club at Westminster, and the smallest, with only three – those MPs who have six children. It is perhaps no wonder that The Mogg needs to recline on those green parliamentary benches in the way he does, from time to time.
On Twitter, a social commentator, Amicus Curiae, says: “If a man had seven kids with three or four different women, having left his cancer-suffering wife and mother of his children for a younger woman, and had an affair with an assortment of women, and then had a child with his much younger girlfriend, he might grace the Jeremy Kyle Show, not be our Prime Minister.”
How do the British public put up with this Prime Minister and at the same time donate millions to Captain Tom Moore? Are we confused? I suspect we are.
Captain Tom turns 100 today, having raised £30m for NHS charities, and has received some 125,000 birthday cards from around the world. He is awarded the honorary rank of Colonel by the British Army. He has tried to remind us that the NHS is funded by the taxpayer; it is not a charity.
But it’s not all happiness and reward today in Britain. A heartbroken nurse, Colleen O’Reilly, blogs about the central drama of this time, the death from Covid-19 of a 55-year-old man, a patient in her hospital, who like thousands of others, passed away without a human touch. She brings us bedside to a drama that has been repeated tens of thousands of times this past two months. It is almost inconceivable. Colleen, we grieve with you and for you. I quote her words here in full:
She says: “It’s my third week as a nurse on a COVID unit and I’m gonna say it, I am not OK. I typically can handle almost anything. I’m usually not vulnerable like this…let alone on social media, but I must share my experience, particularly my past few days.”
“Wednesday night I took care of the most grateful and appreciative 55-year-old man. Thursday morning he called me into the room to promise him I would order him something other than eggs for breakfast and laughed with me when he randomly explained his hatred for white rice lol. I was tidying the room and talking with him, until literally right in front of my eyes, he was gasping for air and needed to go from a very minimal amount of oxygen to a non-rebreather (a lot of oxygen). When I went to work last night, I unfortunately wasn’t taking care of him but saw his nurse working her ass off as he wasn’t doing well. Overnight, this man required the highest amount of oxygen that someone could be on without being intubated. By 6:45am he was struggling to breathe, even with that high amount of oxygen, and within 30 minutes we watched his oxygen levels quickly drop and his heart begin to slow down.”
“As a nurse, I truly take pride in being with someone as they take their last breath. I really believe it is an honour to be beside them during their last moments of life. This was SO different. When this man took his last breath, I cried. NOT because he died…but because although there were three of us in the room with him – he truly died alone. I swear, I am SO grateful for the PPE we are given at this hospital but I have never in my life felt less of a human than when I have it on. Solely because I am not allowed to touch my patients….even if they are dying. We were in the room, but you can barely tell that there is a person underneath our Tyvek suits, and as badly as I wanted to take my gloves off just to hold his hand, I couldn’t. I am disgusted, looking at this photo of me, knowing that this is what my patients see when I take care of them.”
“I’m not sure I’m accurately putting into words how I feel but I pray to God that no one ever feels that way. This man wasn’t supposed to die. He especially wasn’t supposed to die isolated from humans or the human touch. We are required to wear these full suits for our whole shift, the rooms have no windows, and there are no visitors allowed in the hospital. This patient came to the hospital six days ago. That means that he has not physically seen a human or touched a human for the full six days before he died. I will never get over that.
“Truthfully, I will gladly be the doctor’s eyes when they can’t physically be there. I will happily be my patient’s voice when they can’t be their own. I will be EVS, respiratory, transport, phlebotomy. I will be my patient’s daughter, granddaughter, best friend, therapist… whatever shoes they need me to fill. But I am not a machine.
“Patients are not animals, and healthcare workers are not robots. If you are blessed enough to be able to self-quarantine, PLEASE DO. I can only speak for myself but the people I am seeing die, are not supposed to be dying. These people are not just a number on TV during this pandemic and nurses are not machines. There is only so much we can handle – so please spare us some time to figure this out. Stay home, and God bless.”
Reading this, my mind recoils from the horror of it, and my heart goes out to this wonderful human being, Colleen O’Reilly, who writes so bravely about what most of us are so lucky not to see or have to deal with. As you were in that room Colleen, he did not die alone.
I spoke to my brother last night. He is once more in San Francisco loading Fedex trucks with nitrate gloves from China and waiting for a load of masks next week. I ask him again why he is doing this, putting his life on the line for his employer, and he says his hope is to save lives and also to help keep the company he works for alive for all its workers. He is a special man.
The last time Herman and I spent a holiday together was in France a few years ago when he and I, Teri and Jan did a ten-day car tour around Brittany. And once more my mind flies out the door, this time to France and dreams of spending some time there, when this horror has passed.
It is a strange thing to admit to, but it’s true. When I am in France, I have this profound feeling that I am home. It may be the French Huguenot blood I’ve inherited from my mother.
I recall the words of a Paris delicatessen owner where I had first been overcome with the best that France offered; surrounded by breads, cheeses, hams, pâtés, jams, cakes, pastries, salami, olive oils, an overwhelming harvest of the most amazing food. I must have looked both dazzled and bewildered. He looked at me, gripped my shoulder and said: “Courage mon brave, courage!”
How right he was. And I think of all the medical staff and frontline workers who are daily drawing on their reserves of courage.
Click here for Episode 25.
