Life through COVID prism: Nurses, docs walk tightrope between work & home

New Delhi: Being trapped inside PPE suits for six hours is tough, battling the fear of contracting COVID-19 tougher and not meeting children, spouses or parents for weeks the toughest. But that is what they signed up for and that is what they do, say the doughty doctors and nurses at the AIIMS Trauma Centre.
Their days revolve around their COVID-19 patients and their lives around their families and the twain can never meet.
That is the maxim for the band of frontline warriors in the battle against the pandemic who go to extraordinary lengths to isolate themselves from their loved ones and ensure the two halves that make up their world stay completely separate. Like Vikas and Jyoti Yadav, both nursing officers, who live with their children, an 11-year-old daughter and a nine-year-old son, in suburban Gurgaon but haven’t met them for days.
The couple, both posted in the COVID-19 ward of the Trauma Centre, make it a point to return to their apartment complex about 40 km from their place of work. But make sure they isolate themselves from their children.
They haven’t been within touching distance of their children since their COVID-19 duties began. “Isolating ourselves from the children is the most difficult part,” Jyoti told PTI. The children have their own room and have been very understanding.
Since the lockdown began on March 25, Vikas and Jyoti spend most of their time at home in the garden close to the children’s room, watch them go about their daily work and talk to them from there. It is tough but it is a commitment they made. “Vikas proposed to me inside the trauma centre in 2007 and since then we have been working and living together,” Jyoti said. Kanishk Yadav, their colleague at the Trauma Centre, part of the premier All India Institute of Medical Sciences dedicated to COVID-19 treatment, echoes them.
He stays in a separate room in his home in Sultanpuri and hasn’t touched his four-year-old son for three months. His routine is down pat. It’s 6 am and he has just reached home after his shift. He keeps his scrubs for washing, takes a shower and makes morning tea for himself. It’s the end of just another day but he won’t have it any other way.
“When the coronavirus outbreak happened , I wrote a letter to the AIIMS administration requesting them to post me in COVID-19 duty,” the nursing officer said. He added that COVID-19 duty was perceived as something fearful, and he wanted to motivate others.
Yadav also spells out in detail what it is to wear a Personal Protective Equipment suit for six straight hours to ward off the dangers of being in an environment where the risk of infection is ever present. It is a daily hazard for the staff involved in COVID-19 duties.
The routine of getting into a suit and getting out of one is a complicated, meticulous process and extreme care is needed to avoid any exposure. They have to consume their meals at least an hour before donning the suit and avoid even drinking water. (PTI)