Treating COVID19 patients, providing them psycho-social support to help keep them calm and dealing with the constant fear of contracting the infection are some of the many battles that the country’s healthcare workers are fighting daily since the outbreak of the pandemic.
On National Doctor’s Day, some of the women healthcare workers working at dedicated COVID19 facilities across the country shared their experiences of emerging as the frontline force in fighting the virus that has claimed over 16,000 lives and infected 5.6 lakh people across the country.
For Nimrat Kaur, a doctor who pursued the Master of Public Health programme from Johns Hopkins University in the US, working at a dedicated COVID19 facility in Patna has been challenging not only mentally but also physically.
Kaur, who has been a part of different projects of Doctors Without Borders in coordinating emergency response across Indonesia, Cambodia, Laos, the Philippines and Vietnam, said she treats about 25 COVID patients daily in her shifts which are 12-hour long.
“I have a very weird biological clock which I am literally setting and resetting every few days. We have a 12-hour shift so you can’t stick to one personal routine,” she said.
“When I get up I do a little stretching because standing in PPEs (personal protective equipment) for 12 hours at a stretch is really exhausting. Our breaks are not really scheduled or aligned with our lunch breaks as we cannot come out at leisure,” she added.
Kaur last met her family five months ago and it is not very often that she is able to talk to them because of her erratic work schedule.
“It has been five months since I have not seen my family and I am not even able to talk to them due to my erratic shift timings,” she said.
Meanwhile, 26-year-old nurse Anima Ekka said she contemplated for many days before deciding to get deployed at a COVID facility as she wanted to serve others.
“I discussed with my family for several days but I had seen how my own community was struggling because of the disease and I knew that if I wanted communities like mine to be helped, I had to go serve,” she said.
Ekka, who was associated with a malnutrition project in Chakradharpur in Jharkhand, said it is hard to work in PPEs all day long while trying to ensure that we always remain alert and empathetic.