So yours truly got referred to a&e by his gp yesterday morning (long story). Got there at 11am, finished with a&e process at 3:30pm, then had to wait to see someone from “the surgery team”. 12:30am he tells me I’m being admitted. I got moved to a different and slightly more comfortable chair a while after that, at 2:15am I was woken and given a covid test, and then got a trolley at 3am.
At 6am I was woken up and told “guess what - you’ve tested positive. You’re going to the covid ward.”
Well, shit. Zero covid symptoms, but here we are. I’m one of those 254 people mentioned in that tweet above and let me tell you, it’s a living fucking hell. I’m not sure how many patients are on the ward but so far I think I’m one of the youngest. It’s full of very old, very frail, very loud, and very confused people.
There’s 4 men in the room I’m in, all a good bit older than me:
One clearly has some level of dementia and is out of a nursing home. I know this because he spent about 45 minutes on a speakerphone conversation with some poor relative going round and round in circles about getting out of here and back to his “old place”.
One is Eastern European and has a loud, deep voice. I know this because he’s had about 6 or 7 long phone conversations, all on speakerphone of course.
The other guy is very quiet, except when he’s coughing, clearing his throat, mumbling incoherently, or moaning in pain. I also think he came very close to death this morning so I was surprised to see him up and walking about - of course he pulled all his lines out and left his drip in the hallway before he came back, but whatever floats yer boat I guess.
Then there’s me, doing my best to ignore everyone else in the room and not engage in any conversation at all.
Across the hall I can hear an old lady calling out a woman’s name every few seconds. Someone else near her is shouting “ahh ahh ahh” in response. Over and over. All in all it’s fuckin grim.
The staff are, of course, amazing.