Are You Really the Doctor? by Dr Matthew Hutchinson

Author:Dr Matthew Hutchinson [Hutchinson, Matthew]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bonnier Books UK
Published: 2025-09-04T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 10

A New Dawn, Old Problems

AS A GLOBAL pandemic was inching and then suddenly jumping its way to the UK, you might think, as supposedly highly trained problem-solvers, we would have twigged sooner. One night in early March, I had accepted 13 referrals for suspected pneumonia or breathing difficulty, which even for a bad take was excessive.

Believing the line that it wasn’t circulating in the community in the UK, COVID-19 wasn’t double-underlined at the top of every differential diagnosis list, as it should have been. And several of them were young; a woman in her thirties with streaks across both lung fields on the X-ray. At this time, protocols for isolation were still being made up on the fly and, for the most part, swabbing was reserved for those travelling from Italy or China. Ostrich-like, we had convinced ourselves it wasn’t here yet.

It was only days later, doing my usual remote post-admissions snooping, when I saw that once they had finally been done, the tests all came back with the relentlessly consistent ‘positive’. The respiratory ward was soon almost entirely dedicated to COVID, with ambulances dropping off the most red-flag patients straight to a dedicated assessment area.

Writing now, from the comfort of the post-vaccine future, it’s almost impossible to reinhabit the mindset from a time when we knew almost nothing – the uncertainty and the fear, how the reassurances from on high felt like an owner telling you their snarling XL Bully is ‘perfectly safe’. The first night we knew for definite we may be seeing COVID patients, the advice regarding PPE felt as if someone was freestyling it – matching clinical scenarios and levels of protection by spinning the wheel of misfortune.

‘Is CPR aerosol generating?’

(Gameshow audience in unison): ‘Fuck knows!’

‘What protection do we need when doing it? Let’s spin the wheel and find out . . .’

The answer initially (later revised) was that we would be just fine with simple surgical masks. Any sane person considering this for half a second could see it was dumb. As the team member likely to be leading, stood back during a resuscitation, I would be asking the SHOs and others to dive in around the body, sucking in the miasma while they pounded the chest or scoured for veins and arterial blood. I would be responsible, and wasn’t going to submit willingly to any ‘lions led by donkeys’ safety fiasco.

At this time, the medical high-dependency unit (HDU) was still a quaint six beds. They had a stock of FFP3 masks, reserved for the one infectious patient side room, that up until now had been used mainly for cases of flu.

Manny is a kind but vigilant charge nurse. He had been here during my first run through the Trench as an SHO. Highly trained and sharp-eyed, he would stop you from making potentially lethal mistakes – reminding us that if we were prescribing IV insulin for diabetic ketoacidosis, it’s usually a good idea to write up enough glucose alongside it, to avoid killing

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