Covid patients reunited with the medics who saved them
In a light-filled studio in east London, a petite woman in scrubs receives a bouquet of flowers from a tall man, dressed smartly, only faintly out of breath.
The room is thick with emotion. They are strangers, but stare at each other with wonder in their eyes. And then Dr Susan Jain, an intensive care consultant at Homerton university hospital, breaks the silence with a laugh.
“Hello,” she says. “Wow. It’s amazing to see you up and about.”
Karl Gray, a 60-year-old Salvation Army minister from north London, flashes an embarrassed smile. “I’m sorry,” he says. “I don’t remember you.”
These are not long-lost relatives meeting for the first time. Gray is coming face to face with the woman who saved his life, just over a year after he was admitted to her ICU unit, gasping for breath.
“I don’t remember an awful lot about ICU,” Gray tells Jain. “But I am so grateful for what you did for me in those first few days, and I can never thank you enough. You saved my life. And I’m here today to be able to say that to you, which is amazing.”
“Just seeing you looking great is enough,” she replies, her eyes brimming with tears. “It goes beyond anything. Because it’s no secret that many people admitted to ICU did not survive.”
Jain is not exaggerating. In England, almost a third of Covid patients admitted to hospital during the early months of the pandemic died of the disease. So conscious were ICU staff of the taint of death that lingered around their units that, during the second wave of the pandemic, some put up posters, reading: “Most people leave here alive.”
Instead of seeing ICUs as places of horror and sorrow, the public should see them as places of great tenderness and love. They are intensive care units, after all. A place where people with fine minds and empathic hearts use all of the powers at their disposal to keep perfect strangers alive.
Yet the relationship between ICU staff and the patients they treat is often curiously one-sided. Many patients hospitalised with Covid-19 were sedated and put on ventilators, to give their organs time to respond to experimental drugs and, hopefully, to heal. Machines flushed out their kidneys, oxygenated their blood, and manually pumped their lungs. Snaking tubes fed them and took away their waste. The patients hovered in a liminal state between life and death.
The lucky ones woke up from the sedation, recovered, and went home. Many of them never knew the names or faces of the people who looked after
