A year since the lockdown was imposed on March 21, doctors look back at the emotional cost of the virus
At the peak of the pandemic last year, an English teacher asked her class of five-year-olds what they missed most during the lockdown. Answers were typical--the outdoors, friends, junk food--until Suralkar spoke up: "I miss hugging my mom.”
For several months last year, Shalini Suralkar, consultant physician and rheumatologist at Powai's Dr L H Hiranandani Hospital, had cordoned herself off in a separate room from her two sons. Her eyes water easily at the memory of the teacher sharing the story but, at the time, shedding a tear--even when patients were dying in front of her--was a luxury she could not afford as there was always another in line who needed cheering up.
"We felt like soldiers going to the war front without any ammunition and with no guarantee we would return," says Suralkar, summing up the emotional roller-coaster that the lockdown proved to be for frontline workers.
During the suspense-fraught March-to-June-2020 period when--many panicky showers prefixed and suffixed the healthcare workers' PM-induced national flower shower--the air was hazy with rumours, conspiracy theories and uncertainties and the vision of doctors, foggy from wearing PPE kits in non-air-conditioned wards. Death loomed large, bad news had to be broken often and the cost was both personal as well as professional.
"Take me out of here," some Covid patients would scream in the grip of ICU psychosis, recalls Dr Anita Soni, obstetrician and gynaecologist at Powai's Dr L H Hiranandani Hospital, who would confront the Covid-induced demons of isolation herself. On June 20, dark circles ran down to her cheeks and a fever scorched her head when she was tested positive for the deadly virus. The CT scan showed one patch on her right lung but the real dark splotch that the disease cast was on the mind.
"It was the loneliness that affected me more," she says. "Being trapped in a hospital room where I couldn’t communicate because I was on oxygen. Where no one could come to see me. And someone sends stone cold, disposable food. I missed seeing my husband and children. OTT platforms were my only company," says Soni, who lost her uncle to Covid-19 around the time and recalls her son pleading with her on the phone: "Don't die on us".
What kept her going was the relief writ large on the faces of 33 Covid positive patients she delivered during the lockdown. Among them was a patient whose husband was so severely diabetic that his leg had to be amputated. She needed counselling to be reminded to look after herself. "She wanted to be with him but the BMC would not allow that," recalls Soni. "It was total emotional pandemonium."
Reading recent concepts, treatment strategies, having meetings and discussions with the core committee members and making treatment protocols entailed eight-hours of waterless shifts. "We were family for the patients and they communicated with their near ones through us," says Suralkar, who remembers an 86-year-old woman with severe covid infection, deteriorating quickly and requiring very high oxygen at a time when Tocilizumab injection was scarce. While the children and relatives could not arrange for it, "we arranged the injection overnight through a good Samaritan and managed to give her the injection in timex," recalls Suralkar.
During this time, the phone of Bombay Hospital's busy physician Dr Gautam Bhansali had become "a call centre". With calls from relatives of bed-searching patients to VIPs, from an anxious wife to politicians, he would even take the phone to the bathroom every time he took a shower--a count that went up to five a day at times. Among his favourite stories is that of a particular patient, a retired school principal whose 172-kg body was a "museum of diseases" as he puts it. Ridden with breast cancer, hypertension, asthma and obesity issues apart from the deadly virus, she had entered the ICU without hope and walked out free of Covid after 34 days.
That people really cared for their families was the guilt-inducing takeaway that Bhansali had to carry home in the peak-pandemic days when he would organise video calls for critical victims of the virus in the ICU of Bombay Hospital and watch their kin run from pillar to post. even as his own family time dwindled to midnight Ludo sessions. Today, after receiving two confidence-inducing doses of the Covid-19 vaccine, his sons call him Superman. And it's easy to imagine him in the superhero's trademark blue spandex instead of his blue PPE kit when the physician tells us about both the great responsibility that came along with his great power: "2020 taught me the importance of being honest, transparent and never giving up."