From our holiday tent in the garden, the bulletins shock us back to reality
Doctor’s Diary
WE had been chatting across the open wound of the patient we were tending in the operating theatre.
The colleague — a stoical man not known for sharing his feelings in the workplace — sighed: “You know what, John? I’m exhausted.”
He let it all out: the
7am starts, the almostdaily edicts from on high announcing yet another complicated structural change to ward off Covid-19; the constant efforts to find precious theatre space for neurosurgery emergencies.
I could feel my shoulders slump as he spoke.
“Man, I really need this holiday,” I thought. A few more days and I would be enjoying my first week off since this pandemic started. I was exhausted. We were all exhausted. Maybe that was why our little neurosurgery team had a mini break-out.
A nurse on the ward had been looking forward to two big milestones around about now — turning 30 and getting married.
She had to postpone her wedding. But we decided we were damn well going to celebrate her birthday. So we bought a cake and gathered around the nursing station at socially distant positions, eating sponge slices and noisily singing Happy Birthday. The party provided some welcome upliftment in a week that dragged to a close. “What’s the point of taking a holiday? You can’t go anywhere,” one of the team had said.
“Oh, yeah?”
Aoife, my wife, and I had already decided: if we can’t go on holiday, the holiday was coming to us.
I couldn’t cycle home fast enough last Friday night. I raced through the decontamination ritual, ripping off my hospital gear in the hallway, the showering, the cleansing of mobile phone and wallet, knowing it would be the last time for days.
We ordered boxed take-outs from one of our favourite restaurants. The next day we set up a tent in our back garden and went on holiday for the week.
We fell asleep each night to the sound of leaves rustling in the trees behind our terrace home and woke each morning to a dawn chorus, chattering house sparrows and the confused miaowing of our cat.
By day, news bulletins from the US summoned us back to reality. Aoife’s stepfather told us a family friend who had attended our wedding had been injured when police rushed protesters who marched across Brooklyn Bridge in New York in protest at the killing of George Floyd.
She was beaten to the ground by four police officers, one of whom held her down with a club across her neck. She was blinded by pepper spray, locked in a police van and carted to jail for the night.
We later learned she was treated at the scene by doctors who marched alongside the protesters, armed with emergency medical supplies like dehydration kits, bandages and iodine. Other helpers had bathed her face in milk to soothe the burning caused by the pepper spray before she was taken by police.
My wife is American.
Her family lives in New Haven and Hartford in Connecticut. Her cousin lives in Queens, New York. She has relatives and friends all over the US, from Boston to Seattle to California.
Aoife’s mother is a veteran of the 1968 civilrights and anti-war protest marches and knows how to stay safe at protests.
Even so, in our tent in our back garden last week, we had conversations we never thought we would have, such as were Aoife’s parents still safe in the United States?
As doctors, we view protest marches from a public-health perspective, with concern about maintaining social distance.
But justice is one of the four tenets of medical ethics and racial injustice impacts on people’s health, their quality of life and their longevity.
We have seen evidence of that in this pandemic, in the high numbers of African-Americans disproportionately impacted by Covid-19.
I return to work tomorrow and can’t pretend I’m not looking forward to sleeping on a soft mattress between proper sheets.
But already I can feel a rising sense of nagging unease. All week, I’ve seen people easing up on socialdistancing rules, crowds cycling and walking along the promenade in Clontarf, cars clogging the roads and even in the hospital, before I left on holiday, the emergency department getting busier.
Will we experience a second surge? Are we returning to bad habits, passing up a golden opportunity to change our ways? Big questions, but for another time.
There’s an air mattress to be pumped. We’ve got one last night of falling asleep to rustling leaves and waking to glorious birdsong. And tomorrow the tent comes down.
‘Injustice has an impact on health’