Light at the End of the Tunnel

What follows is mostly true.

 I trained as a doctor way-back-when. If I tell you I’m seventy-six now, you can work it out for yourselves. I’m not long retired; after over thirty years as a surgeon specialising in heart by-pass operations, I moved to teaching at Dundee University. I enjoyed it so much I wasn’t in a hurry to retire. I only officially stopped four years ago, and I was still going in and out of the University doing this and that when Covid changed everything.

So, I thought, I’d be an ideal person to volunteer to help deliver the vaccine. A quick refresher stint with an orange and a syringe and I’d be ready to go, leaving the current nurses in their front-line positions. I expected to be welcomed with open arms.

It didn’t turn out quite like that. I knew, of course, that they’d need me to fill in a form: name, address, National Insurance number, phone number. Otherwise they had the complete record of my existence, including every illness I’d ever had and every course I’d ever attended, in their own computers ... except, as Julia, the young woman organising me, explained with an absolutely straight face, except that they couldn’t use that information, for reasons of data protection. We had to start again from scratch.

‘Even when it’s my data, and I’m authorising you to use it?’

 ‘Even then,’ she agreed.

It was a very long form. ‘Or,’ Julia suggested, ‘you could send us your CV.’

My CV ran to thirty-one pages, including stints abroad with the TA and the time I’d been seconded to Beirut. I sent them the lot, and hoped they’d enjoy reading it.

We got totally bogged down in previous illnesses and jabs. ‘Measles? Mumps? The MMR jab?’

It hadn’t been invented when I was a child. ‘I’ve had measles.’ Everyone had measles then. If someone in your class got it, you were all sent round to play, to get it over with while you were young. ‘I didn’t have mumps.’ My mum tried to get me to catch that one too, from a cousin who had it, but somehow it didn’t take.

‘But you haven’t had the vaccine. Well, that’s no problem, we can give it to you.’

I stared at her. ‘Give me the MMR vaccine? But why?’

‘In case you catch it from one of your patients.’ She still didn’t look as if she was joking.

‘I’m not being vaccinated against MMR,’ I said firmly. ‘I think it’s a ridiculous idea.’

We discussed that one for five minutes, but I stood firm, and in the end Julia sighed and agreed that I could miss the MMR if I signed a disclaimer. There was a wait while she found a disclaimer form, put my details in it, and printed it out. I signed it.

She ticked that off. ‘BCG?’

‘Well, yes. At school.’ I remembered it well. The six-needle jab in the forearm, the wait to see if it reacted, the big needle that left you with a bandage for days, a scab for months and a scar for life.

‘We’ll need proof of that. Can you ask your GP to send us a confirmation?’ Her polished fingernail ran down the page.  ‘TB. Do you have any of these symptoms?’

She rattled them off. I was happy to say I had none of them, barring a slight breathlessness going upstairs at speed, which I put down to age rather than TB, and didn’t declare. ‘We’ll also need evidence of your immunity to Hepatitis B.’

I held out my hand, thumb up, for her to take some blood. ‘The results’ll be back in a few days,’ she said brightly.

Then we got on to the actual training – or rather, we got on to the list of training. Most of it was online courses with a short exam at the end of each one, which would take up my afternoons for the next fortnight. Two of the sessions were hands-on, and each of those would take a day to deliver, including, yes, a short exam at the end.

That evening, I phoned a colleague who’d also signed up. ‘Have you seen the list?’ she demanded.

‘I have.’

‘I’m simply not doing it. I looked at that and said ‘No’. Fifteen minutes with a syringe and an orange, if they insist, but not all that. ‘Count me out,’ I told them.’

‘They just have to tick all the boxes on their forms,’ I said. ‘I’ve given them a day of my life already. Shame to waste it.’

The on-line courses were stunningly irrelevant to the situation and my experience.  There would always be an administrator in the room, checking each patient off on the computer, so I’d have thought Information Governance (including Fraud Prevention) could safely be left to them, along with Fire Safety, if the air-steward-style fire speech was really considered vital for a person coming into a large box with the outside doors left open, to let the Covid germs exit first in case of fire.  I expected to wear PPE, of course, but having managed to get myself into surgical scrubs for most of my life I didn’t feel I needed an actual course on it, and as I wouldn’t be wearing a white coat I didn’t need Linen Governance either; similarly, I didn’t feel the organisers could teach me anything about hand hygiene. I conceded the Safe Disposal of Sharps might come in handy, since there was no theatre nurse with a tray, though I reckoned I’d have have worked out for myself that syringes had to go in the box labelled ‘Waste disposal: sharps’. The Waste Management course was basically to put my PPE in the bin labelled ‘Used PPE.’ Skin health boiled down to wiping the patient’s skin before injecting, which could have been given in ten minutes, and saved me one afternoon. As for Diversity and Equality, given the tight schedule (due to completely cleaning the room between patients) I was barely going to have time to register whether my victim was male or female, let alone their ethnicity or disability.  Only the Adult bit of Child and Adult protection was relevant, since I’d be working with the over 80s, over 70s, over 60s and over 50s, if the vaccine supplies lasted that long.

‘You were very wise not to volunteer,’ I told an older colleague. ‘You’re well out of it.’

Still, like Macbeth, I was now so far steeped in blood as t’were as easy to wade forward as back, or whatever the quotation was. I wasn’t quite seeing the light at the end of the tunnel, but there was a greyness that suggested the end was on the horizon. Only the practical courses to go.

Naturally I wouldn’t expect to need Moving and Handling Patients. They’d come in, possibly with the support of a zimmer frame, or one of those little fold-up wheelies or a helpful relative. The administrator would establish that they were the person we were expecting. I’d greet them in a muffled way from behind the mask, they’d sit down and roll up their sleeve, I’d do the jab and they’d get themselves up and go again. It took a day to establish that I wasn’t trained for lifting people, wasn’t expected to have the strength to do it alone and most importantly, I wasn’t insured to do it.

Just out of interest, when Julia turned up to tick our names off on her clipboard, I asked her how many of her original volunteers were still on the course. She looked around at us. ‘Seven,’ she said. ‘There were twenty-nine originally.’ She looked uncertain for a moment, then brightened. ‘Of course it’s asking for genuine commitment, and a lot of retired people keep themselves very busy. Golf, swimming, coffee mornings, that kind of thing.’

I couldn’t be bothered pointing out that the golf courses and swimming pools had been closed for months, and anyone venturing on a coffee morning would instantly be shopped by their neighbour. ‘Really,’ I said, and gave her my brightest smile. ‘That’s a pity.’

The final hurdle was Basic Life Support. Naturally they’d changed the number and rhythm of breaths and heart compressions since I’d last done my First Aid Certificate, only three years ago. We all worked on an adult dummy, and I was thinking it was all over when the tutor brought out the child-size and began breath/compression ratios all over again.

Rebellion rose in my throat. Child resuscitation for former doctors who had volunteered to help innoculate adults was an insanity too far.

I took a deep breath and remembered all the courses. The exams where I’d given the answer they wanted even though it wasn’t the one I’d actually have said was correct. The forms. The correspondance with the Superannuation people who threatened me with loss of my pension if I was paid for volunteering to help in what the Government assured us was a national emergency. The amount of time I’d spent on this already.

I laid out the child sized dummy as instructed, put two fingers on its breastbone and bent over it. Last course. There was light at the end of the tunnel.

Maybe, someday, they’d let me give those injections.