Everything is True by Roopa Farooki

Author:Roopa Farooki
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

11

Frontline

You’ve stopped looking at the news, it only depresses you. The death toll. More deaths today than yesterday. You figure that if there’s something you really need to know, someone will email you.

You’ve stopped looking at your nhs.net emails; there are dozens of them, all usefully with the same Covid-based generic heading.

Covid-19. Covid. Covid news. Covid changes. COVID. COVID-19. Covid update. Covid situation. Covid. Covid-19.

You figure that if there’s something you really need to know, someone will tell you.

You’ve stopped listening to what people want to tell you.

You don’t attend to the messages on your phone.

You walk out of the mess when you hear them talking about the twenty-three-year-old nurse who died, the midwife who died. The constant battering of bad news isn’t allowing the old bruises to heal.

The other old news they’re bickering about is that all holiday is cancelled, at least until July. They’ve also cleared and restarted all the rotas from scratch. You make an activity out of rewriting your rota in bright pens, with the hours you’re working against each day, so the children will know when you’ll get home. You’re now working on your son’s birthday.

One of the junior doctors, a senior house officer, says she is now expected to work a full week, and then cover a weekend of on-call twelve-hour shifts, and then be back at work on Monday. No protected zero day.

I didn’t want to come in today, she says. I wanted to resign.

Everyone is feeling powerless and humiliated by the more powerful bodies in the hospital, in the management offices, for daring to ask for their time off.

The rota coordinators and management staff are all taking their holiday as normal.

They don’t care about us, says another junior doctor. That’s why so many of us are dying. We’re just expendable bodies in scrubs. They wouldn’t work like this.

Who are they? Everyone who can keep their distance. Everyone who made the decision that ended up leaving doctors with inadequate protection. That a jolly, plucky British, take-that to the virus will make up for the fact that you are fighting an insidious illness with a plastic apron and a paper mask.

The prime minister is in hospital, someone WhatsApps the group. This is the sort of thing that breaks through the noise. But you don’t really care, one way or another. You would have, before, felt something. Triumphant that his policy decisions have turned around and bitten him on the arse. The UK brought to you by Netflix, final season plot twist. You feel frustrated that he has managed to martyr himself.

Fearful that if it can happen to him, it can happen to anyone.

But you’re too tired to join the twittering masses and manufacture any opinions at all. You go to bed tired and you wake up tired.

You make breakfast for your kids. Pancakes. Cereal. Yoghurt. Sliced fruit. Milk.

You hug them goodbye and pull on your cheapest clothes at the door. Clothes that you don’t like, and if you have to burn or boil them, you’ll cope.

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