COVID-19: At the Frontline The past 4 months have been a bag of mixed emotions for me. On the one hand, it has been one of the most anxiety evoking times of my medical career so far. On the other, it has also been one that has helped me grow the most, both professionally and personally. Having served at the frontline and been recently diagnosed with COVID-19, I think I am more than qualified to share my experience. Over recent weeks, I have had some time to reflect on this period and try to make some sense of it from various perspectives.
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few weeks before national lockdown began and the government decided to take the situation with COVID-19 seriously, my hospital on the border of London called an emergency meeting for all junior doctors. We weren’t too sure of the exact details of the meeting, but we knew it was going to be the beginning of something significant. I don’t think at the time we thought we would be where we are now.
Kasra Razi ST5 at Darent Valley Hospital Kasra Razi MBBS BSc (Hons), PGCE (MedED) works at Darent Valley Hospital (General Surgery ST5) in Dartford, Kent, and gained his medical qualifications at Imperial College London. He is the co-founder of the British Iranian Medical Association (BIMA), which organises networking, educational and charity events in the UK. Kasra is also a trustee of The Tom Donaldson Charitable Trust: Trust Me, I Will be a Doctor.
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We had started to hear about COVID-19 through colleagues and social media, but the meeting shed some light on what we were about to embark on. It quickly became apparent that this was a very new situation. We were dealing with very little knowledge of the virus, but we were going to do everything in our power to manage the situation. Everyone left the meeting as if we were going to war. I attended the meeting as the representative of junior surgical doctors, and it was my responsibility to update the rest of the juniors in the surgical department. Within minutes of leaving the meeting, various consortiums were created to help share as much information as we could with all of our colleagues. Junior doctors were organising ‘junior doctor COBRA meetings’ to brainstorm ideas
about where we could help most. Within the space of a week everything changed in the hospital: visitors were no longer allowed into the hospital, we had to go through security to get to work and if we didn’t carry our ID badge we weren’t allowed into the hospital. The hospital was divided into clean and dirty areas, and all senior house officers (SHOs) and foundation doctors (FY1 and FY2) working for the surgical department were relocated to help on the medical wards where all the COVID-19 patients were being admitted. All these sudden changes meant we had to adjust very quickly, unsure of what was going to happen next.
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The virus (COVID-19) is like having the flu but on steroids.
I found the transition from a predictable rota to not knowing what was going to happen the next day very stressful. To add to that, I had friends ringing me for medical advice every day, and I was ringing my non-medical friends to make sure they were OK. Like many others, I couldn’t see my family for weeks, as my parents were both above the age of 60 and considered to be at high risk of contracting COVID-19.
