In a frightening and shocking testimony of a person who witnessed the tragedy moment by moment, a doctor recounted how the situation in London’s main hospital was, and how doctors and nurses were powerless to watch the sick die.
The doctor says: “We thought our health services were prepared to support the coronavirus, but the past few days have brought us a disappointing truth.
Have you ever seen someone breathlessly breathed?
As for those who witnessed the situation, they will not be able to forget it forever, nor to forget the state of terror that coincides with it…
I wish to forget all the faces of the dead that I saw last week.
The panic on the faces, the turbulent sound of patients trying desperately to get oxygen, and failing to deliver it to their lungs.
I’ve been a doctor for over a decade, and I thought I had seen everything that could be seen in my career, but I think what made me live in Corona surpassed all expectations.
It was just after lunchtime, on Saturday, when the nightmare started.
The siren sounded at the London Hospital and I rushed to my colleagues to tell me that a patient had a relapse under the respirator.
He was a man in his seventies infected with Corona virus, his heart stopped beating.
What I found when I got to the patient’s room did not bode well for me, there was utter panic, the medical staff did not know what to do, they were hesitating.
This was an early indication of how insufficient a country is prepared to confront this virus.
Electrocution was not enough to revive the patient.
We were two people, a general doctor and an anesthesiologist.
We were unable to do something in front of the disease that strongly killed its victim in front of our eyes.
They are all (doctors and nurses) brilliant colleagues and respected professionals, who like me have been doing their job for a long time.
There was no fear for them, but what I could see, and felt overwhelmed by all of us… is the deadly virus.
Yes, we knew the virus was coming, but we weren’t ready for it.
A few hours before our first corona death was recorded in our hospital, we restructured the place to accommodate the largest possible number of patients admitted to critical conditions.
I am a doctor, I am trained to hide the panic that comes to all of us in times of extreme stress, but this time I could not.
Everyone was constantly shouting at me: “Oh my God, what’s going on?”
We knew that this man was the first person to see him die in this painful way.
The child inside of me was thinking, “If I could only save him, perhaps all of those people who had accumulated in hospital rooms would be fine, too.”
But of course real life is hard, unfortunately this is not a children’s story.
There was no time for calm, as we soon had a complete ward of the deadly virus patients who had to be isolated from the rest of the patients.
But we could not control the disease, and its spread in the hospital was a matter of time.
Shortly after the death of the first case the pager sounded again, and they brought us another person who was burning from fever, this person was hospitalized for a reason other than corona, and now that he is lying down next to those infected with the virus, it was clear that many in the hospital would suffer of the disease.
I had been working for 9 hours straight on an empty stomach, I couldn’t eat, after that I took a little rest.
I was sure that there would be no time to rest after the death of the first case.
Around the same time, the injured began to appear, the hospital siren sounded.
I ran between the wings to receive alerts from all over the hospital.
With every new case being discovered, all I heard was my inner voice screaming louder: “No, no, no, no.
Please, my God”.
For some people, I realize it’s hard to understand.
According to one of the drawings that I saw on social media, “Covid19” is slightly worse than the winter flu.
But let me tell you that the situation is much worse…
Do not underestimate the disease.
Besides the more aggressive lung disease, the possibility of this virus to spread completely differentiates it from any other flu.
As a doctor I have to save lives, but for the first time in my career I faced fear that I could be a silent killer.
I have no choice but to hide and continue this fear.
At the end of last week, it became clear that there is not much we can do to stop the spread of this unrelenting aggressive virus.
Many patients simply do not respond to treatment and oxygen masks… we have nothing”.
