Wales On Sunday

‘IT’S CRAZY HERE!’

Gasping patients and crying nurses sum up life on a Covid ward

- CATHY OWEN Reporter cathy.owen@walesonlin­e.co.uk

NURSES crying in desperatio­n, alarms going off all day and night and wards running out of hospital gowns for patients. These are just some of the harrowing details of an overstretc­hed ward that a young coronaviru­s patient has experience­d at one Welsh hospital. Alexandra Adams, who is a fourthyear medical student at Cardiff University, has been in hospital for seven months being treated for an underlying health condition and tested positive for coronaviru­s the day before New Year’s Eve.

She saw the worst of the second peak of the pandemic and has spoken out about the immense pressure staff at the University Hospital of Wales are under as they deal with gasping patients surrounded by alarms that won’t stop going off.

Writing from her hospital bed, Alexandra, who is the UK’s first deafblind medical student, says: “It’s crazy here, and I’m not even talking about the shop floor. I’m a medical student and have been ill in hospital for seven months, but now I’m on ‘the Covid ward’ (after testing positive just before New Year’s Eve), though most wards in the hospital are now Covid wards.

“We’re all gasping, barking, grunting, and the machines won’t stop alarming at our ‘low sats’ [saturation levels]. Staffing is so unbelievab­ly stretched here – we’ve had agency nurses the past few nights because they are so short. Our call bells could be going off for hours before we’re seen and nobody can come when our machines beep continuous­ly, because they’re ALL going off.

“Myself and a patient in their 80s cried over the noise one night. It was unbearable. One night was so busy that I was left chilling in bedsheets of vomit and urine, where my catheter had leaked, and I had aspirated, for three hours before I was changed.

“The bone pain that comes with Covid is horrific (on top of my preexistin­g Ehlers Danlos and dislocatin­g joints) so I need to be turned regularly, but some nights there’s only been one nurse and one healthcare assistant to a whole Covid ward, so we all have to wait.

“It’s completely unsustaina­ble and none of the staff’s fault.”

She added: “One day, I spilt boiling hot coffee all on me and the bed, but I couldn’t reach the call bell. It had gone all over me and in the bed, down my torso and legs, and into my pants too, but I couldn’t move and I couldn’t reach the call bell. All I could do was shout out ‘Hot! Hot!’ but nobody heard me. It was 30 minutes before a member of staff was able to help.

“The nurse in charge eventually came and apologised, before bursting into tears to me, saying this shouldn’t be and it isn’t what being a nurse is all about. People are dying, yet staff are suffering.”

The situation in hospitals is improving and on Friday, First Minister Mark Drakeford said the total number of people in hospital with coronaviru­s has fallen below 1,800 for the first time since early December and the number of people with coronaviru­s in intensive care is 50% lower than at the peak of the pandemic.

Alexandra, who celebrated her 27th birthday in hospital at the end of January, has been blogging about her medical studies and her stay in hospital, and one particular entry as the hospital dealt with the second spike in coronaviru­s at the start of this year. “One night, the bone and muscle pain from Covid-19 left me howling so much that I had to chew my pillow in an attempt to silence myself,” she said.

Alexandra, whose mum has been living in Cardiff to be near her while her dad and sister are 200 miles away in Kent, says coronaviru­s has hit her “hard” and it is something she wouldn’t wish on her worst enemies.

And to make it worse, she has been targeted by anti-Covid trolls. Alexandra says the purpose of her blog has been to inform people of the real devastatio­n going on behind the closed doors of our hospitals, and to highlight the hard work of the NHS staff at the centre of the battle against coronaviru­s.

She says: “Yet, some people’s comments to my blog have left me shocked and upset. I’ve been called a ‘pile of horsesh**’, ‘fake’, a ‘liar’ whose story is nothing but ‘fictitious’ and ‘bullsh**’. I’ve also been called a ‘photo propaganda prop’ and that I’m ‘scaremonge­ring people into believing that young healthy people are at serious risk when in fact they are not’.

“To top this all off, anti-vaxxers have been insisting I do not get any vaccines, blaming everything on my medical history, and one social media user simply replied to my Covid account with ‘ common cold’. All of this has made me so angry and upset, but I’m still unwell in hospital, so I don’t have the energy to respond back to any of it.

“It’s just such a slap in the face for all of us but especially those who are working tirelessly to save us, and those who have lost loved ones to this virus, young or old. The first person I lost to Covid was a friend of mine, back in the first lockdown. And yes, he was young, with no underlying health problems. So it does happen.”

Alexandra says: “I’m young, in my 20s, and this virus has utterly wrecked me – and yet it’s breaking me to hear of all the anti-Covid protests by those who are so blind to it out there. What has this world come to?”

She adds: “Beyond everything, the Covid-19 pandemic has not only taught me to be grateful for every little thing I do have, but also to be forgiving, in a time where we are met with nothing but incredibly unforgivin­g circumstan­ces.

“The commitment, the love and the pure selflessne­ss of every single person, carer, provider, hero, continuing to push through in a time of such horror is one precious positive this pandemic has not produced, but finally brought out for overdue respect and recognitio­n.”

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Alexandra Adams

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