At the time of writing, nearly 30,000 people have been diagnosed with COVID19, and just over 2,300 people have died in the UK. The NHS has done the biggest reshuffle in its history and my card has been dealt - redeployment is finally here.
I'm shortly going back to the cancer department, 8 months after I paused my clinical work to start a PhD. The overarching emotion is relief. There's also decent dollops of guilt (at the worry it causes my family, and at the time I've been out of the clinical game), anxiety (will I know what to do?) and a general sense of overwhelmedness.
As discussed, Mr KP works as a doctor in the Emergency Department, so we've already started a system of minimising the risk at home as best we can. We've established a COVID19 decontamination area in our house, and a system of cleaning our clothes and ourselves when we get home. We've dug out old pairs of scrubs which we've previously debated throwing away - thank goodness we didn't! - so that I have something to wear when I'm on call (oncologists generally just wear office clothes... until now!). Like a hospital, we now have COVID zones, just within our own house!
So much of this feels like mental preparation - personally, that means avoiding the news. Apart from the fact it doesn't change my management plan (I'm still going to be socially distancing... I'm still going to go back to the hospital...), often it's hard to watch the hype. For example, the hype around escalation and resuscitation decisions. I think this speaks more to the fact we need to talk about this more in non-COVID times if its headline news that intensivists have to make reasoned decisions about who will benefit from intensive care. This is no more true now than it was before, although admittedly we all worry about these decisions becoming more challenging. Perhaps we, as a medical profession, need to learn how best to convey that in times of peace as well as times of war.
I'm stumbling over the kind messages of support from everyone at the university. It's quite overwhelming when people keep saying they are proud of you when you haven't even done anything yet. I certainly don't deserve any praise; it's my clinical colleagues who have been managing the daily changes in policy, rotas and ward movements. My only positive contribution has been towards a UK-wide coronavirus cancer monitoring project - an attempt to learn as efficiently as possible from cases of covid affecting patients with cancer. It's been amazing to see a project like this, one that would normally take reams of paperwork and months of admin, get off the ground in a matter of days. It's reflective of the ability of how the NHS has adapted like never before.
My PhD swansong will be Journal Club - it has felt somewhat surreal preparing a figure-by-figure analysis of a paper about genetically engineered stem cells whilst simultaneously joining webinars to refresh my understanding about clinically managing COVID. Maybe someone in journal club will ask me about identifying bilateral pneumonitis on a CXR, or how to interpret an ABG, or vice versa someone in the hospital might want to know about intratumoral genetic heterogeneity? Unlikely, but a girl can hope!
Life goes on - we've just discovered that our roof will probably require major repairs in the imminent future - and I've got no idea when we'll have time to resolve it. In reality, it's just going to have to wait until we're the other side of this. But we're very fortunate - not least to have jobs and ones that keep us busy at that, which I realise not everyone are lucky enough to have.
So wish us, and our roof, luck. Fingers crossed we all keep it together in the weeks ahead.
I'm shortly going back to the cancer department, 8 months after I paused my clinical work to start a PhD. The overarching emotion is relief. There's also decent dollops of guilt (at the worry it causes my family, and at the time I've been out of the clinical game), anxiety (will I know what to do?) and a general sense of overwhelmedness.
As discussed, Mr KP works as a doctor in the Emergency Department, so we've already started a system of minimising the risk at home as best we can. We've established a COVID19 decontamination area in our house, and a system of cleaning our clothes and ourselves when we get home. We've dug out old pairs of scrubs which we've previously debated throwing away - thank goodness we didn't! - so that I have something to wear when I'm on call (oncologists generally just wear office clothes... until now!). Like a hospital, we now have COVID zones, just within our own house!
So much of this feels like mental preparation - personally, that means avoiding the news. Apart from the fact it doesn't change my management plan (I'm still going to be socially distancing... I'm still going to go back to the hospital...), often it's hard to watch the hype. For example, the hype around escalation and resuscitation decisions. I think this speaks more to the fact we need to talk about this more in non-COVID times if its headline news that intensivists have to make reasoned decisions about who will benefit from intensive care. This is no more true now than it was before, although admittedly we all worry about these decisions becoming more challenging. Perhaps we, as a medical profession, need to learn how best to convey that in times of peace as well as times of war.
I'm stumbling over the kind messages of support from everyone at the university. It's quite overwhelming when people keep saying they are proud of you when you haven't even done anything yet. I certainly don't deserve any praise; it's my clinical colleagues who have been managing the daily changes in policy, rotas and ward movements. My only positive contribution has been towards a UK-wide coronavirus cancer monitoring project - an attempt to learn as efficiently as possible from cases of covid affecting patients with cancer. It's been amazing to see a project like this, one that would normally take reams of paperwork and months of admin, get off the ground in a matter of days. It's reflective of the ability of how the NHS has adapted like never before.
My PhD swansong will be Journal Club - it has felt somewhat surreal preparing a figure-by-figure analysis of a paper about genetically engineered stem cells whilst simultaneously joining webinars to refresh my understanding about clinically managing COVID. Maybe someone in journal club will ask me about identifying bilateral pneumonitis on a CXR, or how to interpret an ABG, or vice versa someone in the hospital might want to know about intratumoral genetic heterogeneity? Unlikely, but a girl can hope!
Life goes on - we've just discovered that our roof will probably require major repairs in the imminent future - and I've got no idea when we'll have time to resolve it. In reality, it's just going to have to wait until we're the other side of this. But we're very fortunate - not least to have jobs and ones that keep us busy at that, which I realise not everyone are lucky enough to have.
So wish us, and our roof, luck. Fingers crossed we all keep it together in the weeks ahead.
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