How the light gets in

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When palliative care doctor Rachel Clarke looked back over her notes typed hastily pre-dawn in the midst of a global pandemic, she expected to find only darkness—an unrelenting stream of death and despair. To her surprise, her insomniac’s diary was “illuminated by pinpricks of light”. “People began to organise, street by street, village by village, to make sure that their most vulnerable neighbours…were safe and fed and kept from harm”, writes Clarke. Rainbows appeared in windows up and down the country in support of key workers, volunteers set to work sewing masks and manufacturing visors, and a retired British Army officer approaching his 100th birthday united a divided nation by walking laps of his garden to raise money for the National Health Service (NHS).

Clarke, who embarked on a career as a current affairs journalist before beginning medical training, has since punctuated her medical career with writing—from Your Life in My Hands, charting her experiences as a newly qualified doctor, to Dear Life, exploring death, grief, and the things that truly matter at the end of life. Her latest work, Breathtaking: Inside the NHS in a Time of Pandemic, spans the 4 months from New Year’s Day 2020 to the end of April that same year—a fleeting snapshot of a time during which life in the UK changed immeasurably.

“Pacing the kitchen and tapping a keyboard became a kind of nocturnal therapy”, she explains. These notes, typed “fast and furiously” while her family slept, open a window to life in the UK in its darkest hours. Turning the pages of Breathtaking, we relive the angst and uncertainty of those early months. The anguish about personal protective equipment (PPE) and testing, death tolls rising too high to take in, and the sudden, unexplained obsessions with baking bread and accumulating toilet paper that swept the nation. But, for those of us who know COVID-19 in only an abstract sense, following the news from the safety of our homes, Clarke gifts us a unique glimpse of life in the eye of the storm. As the crisis evolved, day by day, week by week, we learn, in real time, what life was truly like for those on the frontlines—those who risked everything, not knowing that they would see the other side. “To us”, she explains, beyond statistics and modelling, “the pandemic is a matter of flesh and blood. It unfolds one human being at a time”. In these darkest of times, Breathtaking shows us that the greatest sources of light came from within the NHS.

Beyond the inestimable challenges of treating a new disease, acquiring knowledge on the run as patients lurched from one physiological crisis to the next, health-care workers fought—through the physical barriers of masks, gowns, and distance—to restore the humanity to their practice that COVID-19 so cruelly stripped. Overnight, hospitals cleared of visitors, carparks emptied. For Clarke, whose work in palliative care has made her all too aware of the power of human connection, seeing patients isolated from their loved ones feels like a psychological assault. “Covid even steals the patients’ names. So great are the risks of communication in PPE that it is safer for the nursing team to use bed numbers to refer to the human beings for whom they care”, she writes. Humanity is restored by any means possible: medical students volunteer to liaise with patients’ families, many of whom are self-isolating and alone; hearts knitted by volunteers are used to symbolise the connection between patients and their families; health-care workers add laminated photos of their faces to their plastic gowns. “Our tools are uncertain and improvised”, she writes. “We use whatever we can to draw people back together and we refuse to settle for despair.”

Clarke’s style is intimate and generous, opening up to us her own home and family life. We join her pacing in her kitchen—glued to her phone—as she watches events unfold, first in Wuhan, then Lombardy, and finally on her doorstep. We watch her conceal her anxiety from her husband, guilty at even an insignificant deception. We feel her exasperation as PPE at the hospice runs perilously low. We feel her overwhelming desire to help, which drives her to volunteer on the frontlines. Misty-eyed, we’re there as she attempts to quell the fears of her 9-year-old daughter, terrified of losing her mother. “How can I possibly tell her I have volunteered, that I want to be the one helping these patients?”, she asks.

Although not yet over, the opportunity to reflect on these early pandemic months is at once cathartic and deeply humbling. Powerful personal stories allow us to grieve the loss we have suffered as a nation, far beyond the statistics, as well as to appreciate the sacrifices made by NHS workers and volunteers who put helping others above all else. Although Clarke cannot conceal her blistering anger at the failings of those in charge, at its core Breathtaking brims with pride and positivity. “Every single day, the grit and devotion of colleagues astounded me”, she writes. “In the 11 years I have practised as a doctor, I have never been prouder of nor more humbled by the NHS and its people.”

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