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Louise Curtis: A Nurse's Story

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Louise Curtis A Nurse's Story

A Nurse's Story: краткое содержание, описание и аннотация

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Moving, honest and inspiring – this is a nurse’s story of life in a busy A &E department during the Covid-19 crisis. Working in A&E is a challenging job but nurse Louise Curtis loves it. She was newly qualified as an advanced clinical practitioner, responsible for life or death decisions about the patients she saw, when the unthinkable happened and the country was hit by the Covid-19 pandemic. The stress on the NHS was huge and for the first time in her life, the job was going to take a toll on Louise herself. In she describes what happened next, as the trickle of Covid patients became a flood. And just as tragically, staff in A&E were faced with the effects of lockdown on society. They worried about their regulars, now missing, and saw an increase in domestic abuse victims and suicide attempts as loneliness hit people hard. By turns heartbreaking and heartwarming, this book shines a light on the compassion and dedication of hospital staff during such dark times.

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Throughout those days, I never saw Mum cry. She kept herself busy. We all got on with sorting out the mountain of admin that comes when someone dies. Death has never been a taboo subject in my family, and Dad had prepared a folder with instructions on what to do on ‘his passing’. He’d even written his own tribute; it was terrible, very dry, and read a bit like a cover letter for a job with a truncated list of some of his achievements. My sister offered to have a go at re-writing it with Mum’s help. I was so impressed by the end result and how she delivered it with such confidence in the church. The whole congregation was captivated. It was beautifully written and a fantastic portrayal of Dad’s life. That period ended up bringing us closer together as sisters.

After the initial shock had passed, I felt, along with my sister, that we should thank the paramedics for being so diligent and for staying with my mum for far longer than they needed to. Dad would have been so appreciative too. I know how hard some cases can be, particularly when you then have to move on to the next patient and continue your shift. When we get thanks, it’s often because of a life saved but unfortunately in this case, it was my father’s time. I tracked down an email address and sent a message to the ambulance crew. It was reassuring to have my wider colleagues show first-hand how amazing our NHS emergency team is, and how valuable we are to families and society.

That time immediately after his passing was a bit of a blur. My emotions washed over me like waves; one minute I’d be fine and then the next floored with grief. It was exhausting. There were moments of light relief, though. My mum, sister and I were sitting together in the lounge one evening when my mum asked my sister about ‘her man’.

‘What’s this?’ I asked.

‘It’s nothing,’ she replied, before launching into a detailed description of the crush she had formed on someone she had never spoken to. I don’t know how she gets herself into these situations.

‘Honestly, it’s pathetic. How old are you?’ Mum said, teasing her. ‘Was it a Master’s you got and now you can’t even say hello to someone? You’re acting like a spotty teenager!’

There was one night we all got drunk and opened the door to a neighbour who had come to drop off a condolences card. And I remember trying to wash my dead father’s blood out of the cushions from his favourite chair. I stood at the kitchen sink and thought aloud: ‘I never thought I’d be doing this.’ That chair has remained empty ever since.

At the weekend, my sister went back to London. Ed had returned to work some days before so it was just me and Mum for a little while. We both teared up when I left. Dad had said he wanted to be cremated and Mum had agreed with him that we would hold a service of thanksgiving to celebrate his life and mourn his passing. Both the cremation and the service were to happen on 12 February.

During the days in between, I was taken aback by the strength of my grief. One day, it took me five hours to get up off the upstairs landing floor. I don’t even remember how I got there in the first place. I’m normally very proactive and can’t sit through an entire film without feeling the need to be doing something else, so to be caught in this state of paralysis came as a shock to me.

When I finally made it out of the house to the launderette (our utility room was being refurbished and so the washing machine was unplugged), I sat watching the repetitive circular motion of my laundry for forty-five minutes while crying. It was the type of sobbing where you struggle to breathe. I had palpitations and felt so uncomfortable being outside. I couldn’t pick up the phone to friends who were calling me as the thought of talking to them was unbearable.

It wasn’t long before I had to decide what to do about work. How long is an appropriate time to take off when your father dies? My sister returned to work after a week. I was jealous and angry that she had managed to regain some form of normality, but then I remembered what was expected of me.

Officially, we get two days’ leave for a bereavement of a close family member. If you need longer, you get signed off work, ill. The thought of people dying in front of me when my grief was so raw made me feel sick with worry, so I decided to take some time out. I was also worried that my patient care would be compromised and didn’t want any lives put at unnecessary risk.

I wasn’t ready to make decisions about whether resuscitating a patient whose heart had stopped was in their best interests, or for the difficult and frank conversations I would inevitably have to have with patients and families. I didn’t want to have to break bad news, like the time I had to tell a patient that the back pain they’d had for the last six months – and I had to stop myself from rolling my eyes when they were first admitted – was a symptom of their as yet undiagnosed lung cancer which had spread to the spine. I couldn’t muster the energy to be my usual, upbeat self.

After the initial all-encompassing fog of grief lifted, I realized I had an advanced life support refresher course coming up at work. It involved a written and practical exam. You’re a very fortunate person if you manage to get on to these courses and they’re in high demand and very expensive.

Not wanting to disappoint, I decided to return to work. The written test was fine. In the practical exam we were given a simulation scenario which had already been scripted. The one assigned to me led to me having to make the difficult but correct decision to stop resuscitating the patient. Everyone else managed to save a life. Typical, I thought. Straight afterwards, I burst into tears. It was too close to home and the whole team knew it. They were really nice about it, though, and gathered round me to give me some comfort and to let me know I’d handled it really well.

My first shift back on the shop floor of A&E involved comforting the daughter of a patient who we had decided to complete a Do Not Attempt Resuscitation (DNAR) form on. She completely agreed with the decision but seeing her sobbing and whimpering ‘Dad’ as she sat by his bedside was heart-wrenching and emotionally testing for me. My next patient had taken an overdose because their father had died that day. The saying ‘bad luck comes in threes’ certainly seemed true at that moment.

As the weeks passed, I still thought about Dad every day, more than I thought about Covid-19. The threat from the virus didn’t seem real, unlike the pain of losing Dad. Even when I found out about one of the first cases of suspected Covid-19 in Newcastle, I still didn’t really take it seriously. We were told in a meeting at work, but the sentiment was very much one of, ‘We’ll be fine, guys.’ I thought that Newcastle was fairly distant. My mother was in North Yorkshire but a good hour and a half drive away, and my sister was in London. Then, on 12 February, the first case in the capital was confirmed, a woman who’d returned from China. By 27 February the UK had 15 confirmed cases.

In hindsight, my dad had impeccable timing in dying when he did. It was the same when he was alive. He had been a colonel in the army and our childhood was dominated by his teachings on timekeeping, integrity, charm, tidiness, and ‘work hard, play hard’ approach to life. Not all of it rubbed off on my sister; despite her being intelligent and highly capable, tidiness is not her strong point. I used to get paid £5 to find her glasses in her mess of a bedroom.

Dad would have been classed in the vulnerable, high-risk group of people most susceptible to the damaging effects of this new virus. A natural extrovert, he would have hated physical distancing and not being able to go out and make jokes with all the villagers and the shopkeepers in the nearest town. And if he’d caught the virus? Clinicians across the world were making morally difficult decisions about their patients’ care. Deciding who would be taken to intensive care in the hope that they recover and who would not when this escalation in care would prove futile. For some patients, it was simply too late and the best we could do was to make them comfortable.

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