Call the virus cruel, but not those who try to protect us

NO NEW mothers have died from Covid-19, and there’s a very low rate of the infection amongst pregnant women. It’s a rare good news story from the pandemic, the Dáil heard last week, and proof that firm restrictions on visitors to the country’s maternity hospitals are working to protect women and their babies.

But, as we have seen in so many areas of life touched by this pandemic, the safety of some comes at an enormous cost to others.

The restrictions included bans on partners attending at scans and antenatal appointments to reduce footfall through the hospitals, and that’s clearly had the effect of keeping the virus out. But it has also meant that women, going for a supposedly routine scan alone, have heard the worst possible news without a loved one to embrace and comfort them. Excluding partners and family members from the wards has obviously been a success in terms of minimising the risk to the hospitals’ most vulnerable patients, but it has brought heartbreaking anguish to women who are fragile for other, sadder reasons.

This week, Liveline heard the distressing story of a young woman who feared she was miscarrying her longed-for IVF pregnancy. She asked if her husband could come with her for the critical scan, and was told it was impossible. And so she was alone when she got the awful news that there was no heartbeat. She was alone when she returned the following day to have the miscarried foetus removed from her body, under general anaesthetic, and when she lay in a hospital bed, bleeding and suffering intense labour-like pains and cramping, behind a curtain in a shared ward.

Her distraught mother described her treatment in the hospital as ‘cruelty’. ‘It’s very important,’ she said, ‘to have someone beside you to relay your needs at a time when you’re so vulnerable.’ Not to mention somebody who feels your loss as acutely as you do and who is best placed to know what might comfort and console you at such a time. Another woman, who had suffered six miscarriages, told how she was terrified of going for her scan alone, facing the prospect of hearing that dreadful news for a seventh time, except this time without the solace and support of her partner by her side. It is difficult to understand, as these women wondered, why tough restrictions remain for maternity hospitals – although they are now being eased to facilitate partners visiting new mothers – while the pubs are to reopen by the end of the month. And it is easy to understand why those feeling the harsh effects of these restrictions in the most devastating of circumstances might call them ‘cruel’.

Nobody can deny that the restraints and obligations, imposed on so many of life’s defining moments by the pandemic, have been enormously cruel on so many people.

THEY’VE been cruel on people who have had to die alone, surrounded by strangers in hazmat suits, masked and gloved and anonymous. They’ve been cruel on elderly people in nursing homes and the relatives prevented from visiting them, and on other older folk who couldn’t visit newborn grandchildren for months and who missed that precious phase when small babies change and unfurl by the day.

They’ve been cruel on long-married spouses who couldn’t attend their loved ones funerals, or on people who had to watch a sibling die through a hospital window.

They’ve been cruel on people who have lost their jobs, postponed their weddings, cancelled their holidays, curtailed their modest freedoms to meet and socialise, abandoned plans and hopes, endured second bouts of countywide lockdowns through the imposition of medical guidelines.

But, harsh as these restrictions have been, it is perhaps unfair to characterise the people imposing and maintaining them as cruel.

The masters of the maternity hospitals do not take any pleasure in separating worried or grieving couples at times of terrible news: as much as anyone, they know how vital support and comfort is in such circumstances.

And, however confusing and frustrating the closures and lockdowns might be, they have been done with the best possible intentions in a truly unprecedented and uncharted situation.

There is certainly cruelty at play here, but it is not the cruelty of the people trying to contain the virus: it’s the cruelty of a disease that has taken many hundreds of lives in this country, that is cunning and insidious in its spread, and that makes no allowance for grief, or loneliness, or loss.