On the front line

When Roopa Farooki was writing her real-time account of life as a junior doctor during the pandemic, she hoped she would look back at the experience “from a place of wisdom and learning.” But two years on, another serious Covid wave is hitting her Kent hospital. She’s speaking to me after a 13-hour shift; during her 20-minute break she was interrupted five times by GPs paging her about patients. Most of those she sees hospitalised by the virus are unvaccinated patients in their 20s and 30s—something “very frustrating,” she admits. Her real ire, though, is reserved for the rule-breaking PM. “I feel quite strongly that the political leadership should have put things in place to make things better.”

While most doctor-writers train in medicine before setting pen to paper, for Farooki it was the other way round. After studying PPE at Oxford and writing six novels (plus having four children), she decided to pursue her youthful ambition to become a doctor. Her new book, Everything is True, written during the first 40 days of lockdown, captures the weird early days of the pandemic. She recalls one consultant visiting the ward wearing a mask: “all the acute medical consultants just laughed,” she says. Within a few days, though, everyone was wearing masks—and scrabbling for protective clothing.

Fear spread faster than the virus. It was a shock when a nurse on her ward, “younger and healthier than me,” lost her life. But Farooki and her colleagues couldn’t admit how scared they were because “it just made it harder for us to go on.” She practised a kind of “self-deception” and adopted a professional stoicism: “we have to go and look after our

Roopa Farooki