OF WHAT WE DID’
something about them that would make them feel understood.
“Not just surrounded by the machinery and the noise but that we understood who they were, because that makes you feel safe.”
Nurses, says Ruth, are used to being self-sufficient and aren’t very good at caring for themselves – so it was vital everyone on a ward looked after each other.
After two or three hours in stifling PPE without drinks it was important to take a rest, “because everybody fainting round about you doesn’t make the day any better”.
On some nights nurses would appear from other parts of the hospital to ask if they could help.
“It has been the quickest 12 weeks of my life,” she said, “I don’t even remember some of the shifts.”
As well as work being radically altered, staff also had to adapt to a new world outside.
Ruth said: “People were going home to a different life as well. That for me was very difficult.
“I have three mixed-aged kids, have a wee baby of one, and a seven and a 13-year-old and I’ve got a really busy life, I’ve got a really bustling house, I’ve got elderly parents, I’ve got lots of childcare and everybody just mucks in.
“My husband worked full time throughout this as well so I can see the toll a wee bit now on our children too.”
Ruth said on bad days when there was more than one death on the ward, it was her colleagues who saw each other through.
She added: “I am so proud of what we’ve done. I could get emotional thinking about it.
“We’ve had some horrendous cases and I don’t want to take away for a minute how horrendous this disease has been for people, people have lost their lives, but so proud of how we’ve worked together.
“If you had ever told me that we could have done this and came out the other end...
“You were allowed to scream and cry but then we all picked each other up.
“We’ve watched videos of people who got home and that’s been really emotional, it was worth every bit of sweat and every tear that ran down my nose.
“I wouldn’t advise crying in PPE – and you can’t touch your face to wipe your tears.”
Janice MacLeod is a senior charge nurse and recovery manager for the GRI’s 22 surgical theatres.
Theatre recovery has similarities to ICU in piped gas and equipment for critical care so it was natural that the area would be taken over for Covid-19 patients.
For Janice, a nurse with 39 years’ experience, the simple thing of a WhatsApp group helped her to manage the staff rota and cope with an influx of staff from the plastic surgery recovery team, the Stobhill Hospital recovery team and other areas of the GRI which led to her organising 130 full-time staff.
She said: “When we set up the reception area we thought, ‘They’ll never cohort down here, they’ll use the area upstairs’ but then we got the phone call that we were receiving a patient, I think that was
Iaround about the beginning of April.”
Janice was mindful at all times of the stress on her staff who were undertaking new tasks in a new environment.
“The hardest thing was dealing with the deaths in intensive care and having no relatives present because we are not used to being in that situation,” she said.
“But the first thing we noticed was our nurses’ faces were all marked from the masks, they were really thirsty, they just wanted to come and sit down and have something to eat and drink.
“It was also really important that they could come together in their own staffroom and talk about how they felt and what they were going through.
“So we started doing things like a cooked breakfast in the morning.”
It was also vital to Claire, who has worked at the Royal since 2006, that her staff had the practical and emotional support they needed to get through.
“I guess I didn’t expect it to happen as quickly as it did,” she said. “And I hope it’s the only time I have to cope with a pandemic.”
At the GRI, 58 patients who tested positive or were thought to have Covid-19 were treated in ICU with 40 of them surviving their stay.
Just over three quarters of those who survived ICU are now at home with other 25 per cent still in hospital.
Ruth, who worked through the Clutha and bin lorry crash, said that the momentum of major incidents keeps staff going but now, as things slow down, is the hardest time.
“If you had to stop and think about having to work in it,” she said, “it would be absolutely horrendous. Coming out of this is worse than going in, this part is more difficult.
“There is lots of reflection. You walk about and you think ‘This place was full the other week’. Everywhere was full of patients.
“I’ve never been to war and I’ve no desire to be any kind of soldier but I imagine it would feel like leaving a war zone.
“You need to not dwell on the bad things so I think, ‘The lady from that bed is away home, that lady is away home’.
“So I am still smiling because there’s a wee bit of, ‘We did that’. We did a lot of good together as a team.”