Rachel Clarke - Breathtaking

Also by Rachel Clarke

Your Life In My Hands:
A Junior Doctors Story

Dear Life:
A Doctors Story of Life and Loss

LITTLE, BROWN

First published in Great Britain in 2021 by Little, Brown

Copyright Rachel Clarke 2021

The moral right of the author has been asserted.

All rights reserved.

No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

ISBN 978-1-4087-1376-1

Little, Brown

An imprint of

Little, Brown Book Group

Carmelite House

50 Victoria Embankment

London EC4Y 0DZ

An Hachette UK Company

www.hachette.co.uk

www.littlebrown.co.uk

This book is dedicated to the memory of
four members of staff at Oxford University
Hospitals: Oscar King Junior, Elbert Rico,
Philomina Cherian and Peter Gough.

Each lost their life to Covid-19 while doing
their utmost to help others.

To date, over 600 NHS and care workers
have suffered the same fate.

Heartfelt thanks to them all for their
courage and selflessness.

The majority of these stories are told with the permission of patients, families and members of staff who kindly agreed to be interviewed for this book. I am extremely grateful to them all. Occasionally, an interviewee preferred me to tell their story using a pseudonym rather than their real name. In describing my own experiences, details of situations and the people I have met and cared for have been merged or altered in order to protect their confidentiality.

... perhaps the day will come when, for the
instruction or misfortune of mankind, the
plague will rouse its rats and send them to die
in some well-contented city.

ALBERT CAMUS, The Plague

Death is the dark backing a mirror needs if we are to see anything.

SAUL BELLOW, Humboldts Gift

He lies on hospital sheets, but hes drowning.

Behind closed doors, with neither fanfare nor drama, hes been quietly drowning all night. The act of voicing distress alerting another human being to his plight takes spare air he no longer possesses. Wide mouth, wide eyes, face stunned and stricken. The mask clamps down on skin slick with sweat. His lips are grey, fingertips the colour of bruises. And though the oxygen roars, the highest flow we can manage, its still not enough, not remotely.

My early-morning gasp, unlike his, can be heard. For weeks now, every time I step out of the house, the signs of life astound me. Spring in full tilt, all blossom and abandon. Skies so huge and clean and blue they obliterate, if briefly, the hospital from my mind. In this age of contagion, and only for moments, I feel scrubbed clean of disease, disinfected. The man in the side room stutters on.

Its 7 a.m. While Im on the motorway, the hospital will be stirring. Wan faces from night shifts will be emerging into light. With brains fogged and dim, blinking and yawning, colleagues will be dredging up sufficient energy to deliver the clean, crisp handovers those on the day shifts require. The new arrivals will be donning masks, scrubs and the necessary steeliness with which to endure the twelve hours to come. We are learning that minds as much as bodies require barricades these days.

There are drugs to be dispensed, temperatures to be taken, floors to be bleached, oxygen to be titrated, tea to be brewed, families to be updated, new decisions to be made in the cold light of morning about the patients now marooned between life and its extinction like the man in the side room, alone and drowning.

I feel a little drunk in the car on sunshine and birdsong. Goodbye husband, goodbye children. Sleep on, my little locked-down loves. Dont drive Dad berserk, please. The deserted motorway feels faintly post-apocalyptic. Zombies, triffids, shambling corpses. All manner of B-movie foes could be stalking the hard shoulder, though in this war as the newspapers like to frame it we face an enemy too small to see. One thousand coronaviruses would barely span a human hair. Several trillion might just fill a pinhead.

As indices of apocalypse go, the number of free spaces in hospital car parks is a cast-iron measure of calamity. I pull up, disconcertingly close to the entrance to ED, the emergency department. My usual spot is some derelict tarmac tucked behind a row of uninhabited 1950s huts, condemned since the discovery of asbestos.

I open the boot of the car. No one in my family but me is allowed in here. Its one thing to weigh your own risks of infection, but quite another to know that by going to work you might endanger those you love most dearly. One clean bag, one dirty. I sling each on to opposite shoulders, though if Im honest, the distinction feels too slight to count as more than superstition. Still, you draw strength from where you can. One last glance towards the blue vault above. That warmth, those depths, the sheer spotlessness of empty sky. I breathe in deep, fill my lungs until my ribs splay wide. Anything feels possible beneath a sky like this. With every fibre straining back towards the sun and treetops, I lower my head and walk inside.

All the clamour and chaos of a hospital reception is long gone. No patients, no relatives, no jostling in the coffee queue, no shouting, no swearing, no flirting, no family spats, no crying babies, no bewildered octogenarians, no flummoxed visitors squinting and craning at the maps on the walls, just row upon row of empty seats in the normally overwhelmed atrium.

At the help desk, Molly looks bereft.

Morning, doctor, she smiles ruefully, a lover of hubbub now in charge of a ghost ship. One of our small army of hospital volunteers, she retired from her nurses role well over a decade ago, but couldnt resist returning, a regular on the helpers rota. No one knows quite how old she is now. The thing is, she once told me, but only because I asked, I cant just stop helping people. Thats why I became a nurse in the first place. Its who I am.

I pause for a moment to say hello, keeping my requisite two metres distance.

Are you sure about still coming in, Molly? I ask, raising an eyebrow. Without meaning to cast aspersions on your youthfulness, Im guessing youre probably in the high-risk category if you catch it?

She smiles. Her stack of photocopied guides to the layout of the hospital sits untouched on the desk beside her. I have observed her many times beaming confidence at new arrivals as they struggle to navigate the colour-coded signs to the endless wards and hubs and zones that sprout like bindweed in every direction. She has an uncanny ability to make everyone feel cared for the secret elixir, I believe, of a hospital.

How dare you! she cries in mock indignation.

I grin but say nothing, and a second passes. Briefly, her breeziness wavers.

I know the risks, she says quietly, touching her name badge. We all do, dont we?

I hesitate, glancing down at the text on the badge. Hello, my name is Molly. Can I help you? it asks. Most definitely, is the answer. Indeed, without the hundreds of volunteers like her, the hospital would flounder. I know she loves her role, finds it meaningful, important. But the idea that her selflessness might end up being the death of her is surely a sacrifice too far?