The resultant psychological burn out is rendering them unable to concentrate fully on the current fight, their families or even on their own health. ![]() With the global pandemic not easing, even till today, the senior residents are stuck in limbo as to whether the rescheduled exams are even going to take place. This meant that our promotion to specialist orthopaedic surgeons also had to be delayed. The final year residents who were about to sit for their specialist exit exams in April had their exams postponed to later in the year. All our planned conferences, courses, overseas fellowships and holidays had to be cancelled. It was a privilege to serve the nation during these trying times.Īll leave except for those on compassionate grounds and maternity leave were frozen indefinitely to conserve manpower for the long fight ahead. However, we knew that we had to stay strong and fight, not only for the cause, but also for the close friend and colleague whom we fought alongside with. Fear crept in once again due to the unfamiliarity and demands of our potential new job as well as self-doubt in our abilities. There were plans to deploy surgical residents to the intensive care units to augment manpower there. The psychological stress that accompanied each rotation at the screening center and each faint respiratory symptom, bore us down slowly. However, if we didn’t report and were positive, we would do injustice to the hundreds of innocent disease-free patients that we saw. Have we succumbed to the virus? Should we report our symptoms and get ourselves tested? If we get quarantined, our friends and colleagues would have to work harder and our absence would burden them. Every itchy throat or a heavy cough or sniffle would send alarm bells ringing in our heads. As we toiled on, doing shift work in the screening center and coming into close contact with suspected and confirmed cases, many of us made arrangements to minimise contact with our loved ones at home by staying instead, at isolated temporary lodging facilities during our high-risk work. Contracting the disease ourselves in the line of work was one thing, but to spread it to family, unthinkable. Many were also caring for their aged parents in the same household. Some of whom had pregnant wives who were about to deliver or were pregnant themselves. Many of our fellow colleagues had new families with young infants. What if we contracted the virus? What if we spread it to our loved ones at home? We soon realised that the fear was universal and palpable. We could not fathom the devastation SARS had, but knew the impending outbreak was going to be worse.Īlong with the excitement of being of service during what we thought was an opportunity of a lifetime, came with it the unfeigned fear. ![]() When some of us were scrubbed up for a spine surgery with our senior consultant, who was also the orthopaedic HOD in 2003, with a somber voice, he started sharing some of the stories and the sacrifices of the doctors and nurses then. When our stoic head of department (HOD) got choked up when he was sharing about the passing of his close colleague during the SARS fight, there was pin drop silence amongst the juniors. As days progressed, through the cracks that started appearing on their previously composed facades, we increasingly caught glimpses of the mix of panic with streaks of nervousness and fear in the eyes of our seniors. We saw a staged deterioration in the grim faces of senior doctors who had lived through the trying SARS period. With the first imported COVID-19 case on Janu2, and Februseeing our nation’s first locally transmitted case, hospital management realised that an outbreak was imminent. ![]() We were ignorant on the impact this deadly virus had on our healthcare system until the first few cases of its much more contagious cousin hit our shores in early 2020. Many of the junior doctors from the department, were all in our late teens or just out of high school when SARS hit our nation in 2003 1.
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