Witness: A doctor's plea from the ward after a year on Scotland's Covid front line

After a year of battling the rising tide of Covid on the wards of one of Scotland’s leading hospitals, a senior medic gives a searing personal account - and a heartfelt plea - to patients past, present and future.*

Plea: The leading medic has written a direct plea after spending a year on the wards battling Covid.

It’s been a year since we first heard about COVID, an infectious disease that started thousands of miles away. It took weeks for it to spread to Europe and then before we knew it, there were COVID cases in Scotland.

You watch the news and see what’s happening - hospitals filling and people talking about PPE and ventilators. You were bemused by the first lockdown. You’re fit - you ran a half marathon a few years ago before the pressure of family and work stopped the exercising and your weight crept up. The people on the news are all older and have ’other health issues’.

Not you though. As lockdowns came and went, you kept a healthy scepticism about the public health measures.

The blogs and YouTube videos that your friends shared on Facebook tell you that COVID is a hoax, that lockdowns don’t work and the best thing to do is let it run through the population and get back to normal via herd immunity.

When Christmas came, lockdown was off and then back on due to a ‘new strain’. You and your friends were fed up and talked about it at your house on Christmas Eve. You enjoyed Christmas with extended family as you’d planned it and it was “COVID safe”.

The cough started a few days later. It was nothing to worry about, even after the positive result of the test that your wife made you get. The same was true two days later when you couldn’t catch your breath, your kids were frightened and you went to get checked in A&E. They kept you in and put you on oxygen. Within 24 hours, you were in High Dependency and two days later, we met for the first time.

I’ve spent the last year doing this, just this. When I’m not at work looking after the sickest patients with COVID, I’m at home with my kids living a life free from holidays and meals out, just like you.

I started scared of the unknown and have only gotten more scared, the more I have seen and learned, just like you.

When we meet, you struggle to breathe and you are so tired that you would agree to anything. I explain intensive care, what the machines involve and how we will support your organs while your body recovers.

Within the hour, I am watching a tube slide between your vocal cords as your oxygen saturation gets lower and lower. While my team puts in lines and turns you onto your front, I speak on the phone to your wife and teenage kids.

I apologise that they haven’t been able to see you, that we will do what we can, but that it’s not looking good and your chances of dying are more than your chance of living.

At this point you are still one of the lucky ones, I have had too many of those other conversations, the ones where I tell families their dad is dead.

Over the next three weeks, we struggle to keep your oxygen levels up as your lungs become more inflamed then scarred. You needed a tracheostomy to help get you off the breathing machine and your family only see you through an iPad held by a nurse.

Eventually we get you better while you are haunted by the sights and sounds of those around you who disappear while you sit in a state between wakefulness and asleep, their fate unknown. Eventually you get home, struggling with everyday tasks.

I see you in the supermarket a year later, I recognise your face but say nothing. We’ve both been damaged by COVID in ways that others can’t see. Your lung scarring means you move more slowly while my damage is the broken sleep, the weight of decisions made and the memory of countless children, parents and partners to whom I’ve apologised that no more can be done.

So wear a mask, stay at home, wash your hands and take the vaccine. If you can’t do it for yourself and your loved ones then please please do it for me. COVID doesn’t happen to ‘others’, it’s happening to us all.

The location and details of the doctor have been deliberately omitted to protect their identity.

A message from the Editor:

Thank you for reading this article. We're more reliant on your support than ever as the shift in consumer habits brought about by coronavirus impacts our advertisers.

If you haven't already, please consider supporting our trusted, fact-checked journalism by taking out a digital subscription.