Cast Away

Junior Resident*

Just a junior doctor on my daily rounds, I have sent a colleague home for a flu as it could be corona. Two days pass by, I am taking students around the ward looking at patients, when WhatsApp beeps on my phone, its message blaring loudly across the screen…’CORONA POSITIVE’.

The next few moments seem a blur, multiple thoughts race across my head, yet I feel numb. A meeting is held in a rush. All those exposed look at each other silently, then gaze at the floor. It’s like a bomb has exploded and we are stunned but there’s no physical wound to treat. Questions shower us like shrapnel...

What should we do?
Should we go back and continue treating patients?
Should we call home?
How did this all happen?
Did we infect anyone without meaning to?

A consensus is reached, and the medical superintendent says we are supposed to go home and monitor our symptoms.
Pack your bags, it’s time for quarantine. Separate room, away from family. Food through the door.

Connected to the world, yet disconnected...A medical professional made homebound, with physical contact cut off completely. Cast away.

Front line defence down. The virus infects yet another doctor, and then another and the numbers soar. Several hospitals begin to report stricken healthcare professionals.

More questions swirl around  us…Where did we go wrong? Who should we blame?  Was this avoidable? Could we have done things differently?

It boils down to this: we are responsible at our own level, but we look towards our institutions for guidance and necessary protective gear. There were warnings enough globally - but at a personal level, we began to take matters seriously only when it was too late.

In hindsight, we should have had stringent precautions enforced from the start. Right from the beginning, when COVID-19 was still something happening in neighbouring China and Iran, we should have identified patients with a history of travel, and isolated those with symptoms. We should have been wearing protective equipment while seeing patients in the casualty department. But honestly, we had never even heard of PPEs before now.  

You can manage at the right moment, not later. Indeed, we waited long enough to have the virus penetrate our ranks. While we wait in quarantine, for symptoms to appear or not appear, we get an unusual perspective: Healthcare providers are not invincible after all, we do require protection - not just in the form of physical barriers but also in the form of foresight, before the problem comes to a head and becomes a calamity.

We have to take care of ourselves first if we want to take care of others.

* The writer is a doctor working in Karachi, Pakistan