When Roopa Farooki was writing her real-time account of life as a junior doctor during the pandemic, she hoped she would look back at the experience “from a place of wisdom and learning.” But two years on, another serious Covid wave is hitting her Kent hospital. She’s speaking to me after a 13-hour shift; during her 20-minute break she was interrupted five times by GPs paging her about patients. Most of those she sees hospitalised by the virus are unvaccinated patients in their 20s and 30s—something “very frustrating,” she admits. Her real ire, though, is reserved for the rule-breaking PM. “I feel quite strongly that the political leadership should have put things in place to make things better.”
While most doctor-writers train in medicine before setting pen to paper, for Farooki it was the other way round. After studying PPE at Oxford and writing six novels (plus having four children), she decided to pursue her youthful ambition to become a doctor. Her new book, Everything is True, written during the first 40 days of lockdown, captures the weird early days of the pandemic. She recalls one consultant visiting the ward wearing a mask: “all the acute medical consultants just laughed,” she says. Within a few days, though, everyone was wearing masks—and scrabbling for protective clothing.
Fear spread faster than the virus. It was a shock when a nurse on her ward, “younger and healthier than me,” lost her life. But Farooki and her colleagues couldn’t admit how scared they were because “it just made it harder for us to go on.” She practised a kind of “self-deception” and adopted a professional stoicism: “we have to go and look after our patients… So let’s just go and do that.” She had little time for those doctors exhibiting their virtue in sad selfies on social media. The clap for the NHS was a political manoeuvre that left her cynical. (“I prefer cash,” one porter told her.) Black humour permeated the wards. “Who have you pissed off at the hospital? Who’s going to save you that last ventilator?”
Walking home to her children was fraught with anxiety. She hoped against hope that the wind would blow the virus from her hair and the sun burn it away. Before entering the house, she had to change her clothes and wash thoroughly. (“My stethoscope is clean. Everything’s been wiped.”) The children also feared for their mother. At one point they asked what cakes she would like served at her funeral.
Through all this, Farooki was coping with her own grief. Her sister Kiron had died of breast cancer in February 2020. The book is full of Kiron’s words, real and imagined, affectionately rebuking or reassuring her sister. Suffering this loss, Farooki says, “helped me empathise” with relatives who did not have the chance to say goodbye in person. “The grief I was feeling was, quite quickly, submerged by everyone’s collective grief.” Focusing on Kiron was, for Farooki, a way of “freezing that memory.”
Did writing the book help her process it all? “It wasn’t helpful at the time—it was actually really painful. Having lived a really bad day, I relived a really bad day by writing it down.” So why did she do it? “I felt this duty to keep a contemporary account because otherwise we would never believe that we lived through that, that such mistakes were made, that we worked under such conditions.” She only stopped writing when Covid fogged up her brain. Her book, Farooki hopes, will be a record that at least people shared “some sense of solidarity—that they didn’t go through it alone.”
There is an understandable human urge, she says, “to put it behind you and move on.” But for many that still isn’t possible. Soon Farooki will be back on the wards.
