The young woman as a pandemic-era doctor

A glimpse into the life of a person working in a Covid facility in the Capital

She is a doctor, assigned to the Intensive Care Unit (ICU) of Safdarjung Hospital’s dedicated Covid-19 facility, in Delhi. In other words, she attends to the seriously ill coronavirus-infected patients. This month, she has seen sufferings and deaths. Her duty hours are long—from 9 am to 9 pm on one day, and from 9 pm to 9 am on the next one, followed by a day off before restarting with the same schedule. She gets a 14-day quarantine after every 14 days of duty. In fact, right now, she is talking from her home in Janakpuri.

“The first thing I do after I complete my 12-hour straight shift, is have a good long sleep,” says Dr Arushi Saili.

But what does a doctor like her, working at the very heart of the ongoing pandemic, see in her dreams?

Chatting on Whatsapp video, Dr Saili goes silent for a moment. “I see the daily routines of my work... myself, in my protective wear in which it is so difficult to breathe (in)... but everything’s hazy, dull, unmemorable... as most dreams are.”

A resident doctor specialising in anaesthesia and critical care, the hospital’s ICU has been Dr Saili’s daily life for about a year. “The patients I have to deal with in the normal course of events come to me in an already critical state.” Simply put, Ms Saili, 26, has seen death many times over, due to the very nature of her profession. “One can never get used to see a person die, but one has faced such a situation so frequently that one is able to accept it as part of the job.” To her, the toughest part of a death is to break the news to the loved ones.

She vividly remembers the first time she had to declare the death of a patient to their relative. It was last year, during her first month in an ICU as a resident doctor. A 16-year-old girl had succumbed to her injuries. Dr Saili had to walk up to the girl’s