The difficulties of acute psychiatry overnight in A&E

I think we can all agree that living and breathing coronavirus news every day is boring - especially since the 23rd March when lockdown basically started. What is perhaps less boring, and more frightening, is the fact that health professionals are having to rely on PPE from a pandemic stock acquired in the aftermath of 2009’s swine flu that is, as of the latest Channel 4 report, 45% expired.

I go to work expecting the crush of winter, an everyday struggle to see patients, to move them on and beat the targets that have terrorised A&E since the Tony Blair administration of the 1990s.

Now I see silence.

There used to be an orangutan plush in Paediatrics A&E. The HCAs called him King Louie, and he was the greatest assistant ever.

Ours is the first hospital in the UK to have a doctor die from COVID-19. It’s not officially a confirmed case, but all the signs were there. The result, as a relative puts it, is academic.

I feel like a soldier not in the sense that I am in immediate danger of having my guts blown out (though let’s not talk about my lungs), but in the ways that I’ve been kept from my other half - be it by the existing distance or by this enforced quarantine.

I feel like a bad soldier. I was exposed through incorrect triage to a sick patient who is highly likely to test positive. Since I developed a cough very soon after, I have self-isolated, but this has come just as the death rate has started to accelerate, just as the wave is about to crash.

We as medics are taught to be empathetic to a fault, but when fault lines appear in society’s fabric, such as those torn by coronavirus, where is that empathy going to go except down into the cracks.

On the frontlines, compared to other developed nations, our supplies are merely ‘adequate', ‘appropriate'‘…