BESTSELLING WRITER WHO RETURNED TO THE FRONTLINE AS A CRITICAL CARE NURSE
WHEN best-selling author Christie Watson saw footage of Covid patients on TV last April, during the first peak, she knew that she had to return to the NHS frontline.
‘As an ex-ICU nurse, I had critical care and ventilator experience, and had worked on adult crash teams. It’s such a specific set of skills and I knew they’d be short of critical care nurses,’ she says.
A single mother of two, Christie, 44, had been a nurse for 20 years and had worked in paediatric intensive care, but left to write full-time in 2018.
‘It was a massive decision to return,’ she recalls. ‘I lost a lot of sleep trying to work out the level of risk to my family.
‘My mum didn’t want me to do it, but understood. In the end, it was the conversation I had with my kids — my daughter is 16, my son 13 — that spurred me on. They said: “You have to go back to help people, Mum.” They were the ones who were really brave.
‘My daughter, Bella, volunteered to do the cooking and to oversee her brother’s homeschooling.’
Christie made sure her will was in order. Then, after a day’s refresher course, she was sent to the Nightingale Hospital in East London, one of the emergency hospitals set up for Covid.
The team consisted of military, senior nurses and doctors, and people helping out who had no hospital experience at all, including airline cabin crew.
‘We were busy with really sick people, with teams who had been thrown together from all over the country, but everyone was incredible.’
Christie was made head of nursing for compassionate care. ‘My role was about ensuring that compassionate care was at the heart of all we did, for patients, their families and for staff, too.’
The Nightingale was built for 4,000 beds and criticised for being almost empty. ‘But we had 34 patients at its height, the same as the busiest intensive-care units,’ says Christie.
Though PPE supplies were initially good, by the end of the first peak, says Christie, they had to re-sterilise then re-use gowns — ‘and of course they started ripping more easily’.
Every single day, someone was in tears, she says, even very senior people.
‘It was the most challenging thing I’ve seen or done in 20 years.’ But coming home to her children was the worst part. ‘Every night, after a 12-hour shift, I’d disinfect my car, the keys, my shoes and go into our house, desperate to see them. I’d shout up to them to stay in their rooms, scrub myself down and wash my hair in the shower, crying, and put everything in a hot wash.
‘Then, finally, I’d give them the biggest hugs in the world.
‘They coped amazingly but I’m sure they picked up on the fact that not only was I traumatised by what we were going through, I was very concerned I’d bring something home and give it to them.’
Today, she admits, she might make a different decision. ‘Initially we thought Covid wouldn’t affect children, and now we’re seeing children with long Covid, which can be debilitating. So I’m far more anxious.
‘Knowing the risks, I’m not sure I would make the same decision — though the overwhelming guilt of not helping would have been worse.’
Having missed so much in her children’s lives, she overcompensated afterwards. ‘I’d get up early to make eggs on toast, things I’d never normally do. The children looked at me suspiciously: “Why is she trying to be Mum of the Year?”’
When the second and third peak hit, Christie couldn’t take more time off from her other jobs (as well as writing, in June she was made professor of medical health humanities at the University of East Anglia), but she is still proud to call herself a nurse.
‘We need nurses now more than ever,’ she says. ‘Not only are nurses still making huge sacrifices on the frontline, but so too are their families.’
The Courage To Care: A Call For Compassion, by Christie watson (£16.99, Chatto), is out now.