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Day 1 What’s that coming over the hill?

Updated: Dec 11, 2020


Tuesday 10th November. I always wake up just before the alarm, what’s that about? Why can’t I have those few extra minutes? When I wake up this morning, I am aware of a tightness in my chest, it is a fairly mild feeling, I can’t quite take a deep breath. I have been asthmatic all my life and have a pretty good understanding of my condition and an awareness of my chest. This feels a bit odd, no wheeze, yet I cannot quite fill my lungs. Ah Q-Var I think to myself! Due to shortages of my regular Inhaled corticosteroid inhaler, Clenil, my preventer, I have been prescribed a different one, Q-Var, which I assume accounts for this feeling. I don’t feel ill in any way, just a bit “tight”


I am a Nurse Practitioner, a nurse who diagnoses and prescribes medication, traditionally a doctor’s role. I have been working for the NHS, mostly nursing, for very nearly forty years and I am due to retire on my sixtieth birthday, in a little under six weeks, on the twenty first December. I am an old style Registered General Nurse, I don’t have a degree or even a diploma, I have reached my present position through gaining experience, training in extended roles and being confident in my practice. Presently, I am working for a GP practice caring mostly for Minor Illness and Urgent “on the day” Cases. When I get to work, I discuss my slightly tight chest with a colleague who specialises in asthma and she suggests I should increase my preventer inhaler.


I have a fairly quiet day. One of my patients is an 84-year-old man, let’s call him John, who had struck his leg against an iron post in his garden four days previously. He told me he lives alone and didn’t want to come to the surgery or go to A and E “To be honest son, I am shit scared of catching the virus” he told me “I know I should have come in earlier”


He rolls up his trouser leg revealing a gaping, full thickness “L” shaped wound 3 inches x 2 inches. The skin flap is black and necrotic, the surrounding tissue has mild induration (stiffening through swelling) and is hot and dark red, clearly infected.

I clean and dress the wound and prescribe a broad-spectrum penicillin, Co-amoxiclav, known in the trade as Domestos as it ”kills all known germs -dead!” It’s a drug that is used with caution as it can create anti-microbial resistance, innocence is bliss, I have no idea that I am to have a much closer relationship with “Domestos” in just a few short days. I arrange to see John in two days to check that all is well.

When I get home that evening my wife, Brum, tells me she has a bit of a sore throat. This always concerns me because my wife is slightly tougher than rhinocerous hide and never, ever gets ill. I have an extra puff of my steroid inhaler.


Covid Consternation


I remember when I first heard about this new coronavirus in China. So many rumours. So much fake news. So much panic. Pigs? Rats? Bats!!!Then the news came that it was spreading across the world, as a Nation we had a lot of time to prepare, but of course, we chose to be the rabbit in the headlights and sit in the middle of the road watching the headlights get bigger.


I am not a superstitious person. I don’t believe in ghosts or fate or destiny or religion, but I remember feeling a cold tendril of fear wrap around my heart when I read about this killer disease, I can’t explain why, but I knew that there was something very personal about this virus, I felt that it was coming for me.


I am sure a lot of people must have felt that way, but I had flu in December 2019 and developed pneumonia, I just about stayed out of hospital but it was two months before I could return to work and eight months before I achieved my normal fitness. I knew that if I got this new virus then it could be very bad, possibly fatal. And that fear of Covid prompted me to make the decision to retire from nursing.


As the virus started spreading in the UK, we had a meeting at the practice to decide how we would deal with it. There was very little government advice and at a fraught meeting I must admit my fear made me speak out for closing the practice and working from home two weeks before the deadline set by the government. I am glad to say we did exactly that. My colleagues teased me about my vulnerability, my boss and good friend Andy suggested that I could be a “canary” for the rest of the staff.


“We can stick him in the waiting room and if keels over we can all go home!” he happily joked. We all laughed.

 
 
 

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