Nurses working in pandemic 'grateful to be alive'

"I remember we had some patients that we thought [had] flu. From there, one bay became two bays... and then on and on and on."

Nurse Molly Macdonald was working in the short stay medical unit at Worcestershire Royal Hospital when it quickly became overwhelmed in March 2020.

She was new at the job and 22.

"We didn't really know how to cope with it..." she said, remembering what it felt like at the time. "I find it actually quite hard to remember because I think I've blocked it away. I just remember becoming this anxious individual."

Ms Macdonald remembered the period as "chaotic and stressful". She said "everyone was scared for me" but said patients and relatives were just as scared.

"You didn't know what to tell your patients," she said. "They didn't know what was happening to them. They didn't know how sick they could get with it.

"We'd have to put on full PPE before we could come in and out - just everything about it was incredibly awkward and frantic."

A low point was the day at "least five or six patients" died within a 24-hour period, remembered Ms Macdonald.

"I just remember doing a lot of hand holding. I wasn't the person that should have been holding their hand. It should've been their family."

The experience made her anxiety go "through the roof" and she had to leave one ward because she could not cope any more.

"But that's got better now with time," she added.

Fellow nurse Jade Linden said people couldn't really understand what she and other medical staff were going through.

She was 25 at the time and had been an intensive care nurse for a while.

"I think probably about the mid-point of the month we thought... 'this is getting pretty crazy'," she said.

"The day we found out we were getting the vaccine, I went in, had my vaccine, came out and cried in the car, because I thought 'there is gonna be an end to this'."

But the fear and trauma hasn't entirely gone away, she said.

"I'll be admitting a patient who's positive for Covid and I think everyone just spirals back [into] thinking 'no, not again'.

"It's quite traumatic for a lot of people, putting [PPE] back on and having to stay in it for hours."

The experience of working through the pandemic seems quite surreal to Ms Linden.

"It feels as if sometimes I'm just telling a story from a film that's happened," she said.

"I think sometimes people do just sort of forget that it did happen."

Ms Macdonald said she had learned to appreciate the things she took for granted before the pandemic, like going outside, which she said she values "so much".

"I think you just learn to appreciate the little things again," she said. "I just can't believe [the pandemic] actually happened. I'm grateful that I'm here."

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