Running makes a better Doctor

  My personal battles: Having been part of the team during the previous wave and after returning to the department as its head in the early part of the year, I had to be in control of things while taking the team along during this wave. As the number of cases increased in the last few days of February, from 4 to 40 and then 80 over 3 days, it was time for a physician to be amongst the junior doctors managing the patients till then. Underestimating the direction this surge would take and thinking of it to be a short spike, we decided to keep the juniors in the zone managing the patients, and senior physicians to take rounds twice a day. I volunteered to be there for the task, as all other senior physicians were staying with their families and would have risked taking the infection back home. This arrangement worked well, till the numbers got out of hand to over 140, and in mid-April, a team of doctors was sent to live inside the zone in a 10-day cycle for better management. I cont...

Response on war footing: We were at war for more than a year, and now it had reached unprecedented proportions. The gravity of the situation was soon understood by the military hierarchy and a war ops room like setting was created incorporating all the stake holders. All the non-clinical responsibilities were delegated to the administrative staff in the formation, allowing us to focus on our specialized task. Daily conference calls with the head of the formation ensured speedy rectification of issues at hand especially pertaining to oxygen crisis and manpower shortages. For a change, the medical service had become the “Arms of war” and the infantrymen in the staff were deployed to play the supportive role.   I could see their enthusiasm as they seamlessly got involved in the hospital logistics and in the process, developed a newfound respect for their medical brethren, whom they saw fighting on the frontline, against this ruthless, invisible enemy. Administrative tasks having...

Resources overwhelmed: I stood in the reception facing these patients for a few hours every day, just to let them know that we care and to let my junior colleagues know that they do not have to face it all alone. One fateful night, the crowd of around fifty patients stood their ground and refused to go back despite our inability to provide them with beds, citing that they had no other place to go, and would prefer to die here in a hospital with dignity than die on the road. These words struck me deep within and I realized how helpless they all were and it should be our duty to help them in whichever way we could. I knew that we had to open up all our doors and let them in. This was the moment for which each of those beds with oxygen had been put in place. One call to the hospital administration set things rolling. Some wards which were still catering to COVID negative cases, were reassigned to take on COVID positive patients at a short notice. This entailed moving out patients, r...

As the initial surges of COVID-19 subsided towards the end of last year and some semblance of normalcy returned, the world was beginning to settle down to lick the wounds and gather the pieces.   At our hospital, which had seen almost 8000 cases till Feb 2021 while marking a year of our battle against this dreaded pandemic, the non-COVID areas were returning to their usual activity and patients were back in large numbers for ailments other than COVID. By the end of Feb’21, the COVID zone, which had seen a flurry of activity all these months, was now restricted to just a single ward with four patients, the nadir we had reached. The staff in the zone was limited to just a medicine resident with hopes of closing down the remaining ward too. Maybe we spoke too soon, as within next few days, the numbers rose exponentially to 40s and 80s although mostly asymptomatic or mildly so. Still hopeful, and in denial, I thought this was just a blip and won’t last long, so we decided to contin...