Over the last month, the first wave of Covid-19-related hospital admissions have hit London and the hospital where I work as a junior doctor. Twenty-one days ago I was redeployed from surgery to critical care and trained to support the patients in our expanding ICU.

We talk about coronavirus all the time, but it’s often in terms of a bigger picture. I find it hard to make sense of that bigger picture from the frontline. In a crisis of scale I want to tell the story I’ve seen – the story of a pandemic unfolding one person at a time.

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The expanded ICU is a surreal world. I don layers of stifling PPE to enter into “Covid zones” – zip-entry plastic marquees within converted hospital bays. I enter a ward full of unconscious patients. There’s no chatter, just beeping monitors over the rhythmic hiss of pressured air. I spend every 12-hour shift caring for two or three patients. It’s humbling, often manual work. I’m adjusting their anaesthesia agents and checking their urine hourly to balance their fluids. I’m placing pillows under pressure points so they don’t end up with lasting damage during their paralysis. I suction secretions from their airways.

I’m working the hardest I can, delaying toilet breaks, for a patient who I have never seen open their eyes, let alone breathe for themselves. It’s a difficult environment to work in.

I trawl through medical notes to find my patients in a time before they were paralysed and sedated and put on to a ventilator, to catch a glimpse of the person they are. I try to get to know them through the jewellery they used to wear, now safe in a tray at their sides. I conjure them up from sketched details in their past medical notes.

Social history: Lives with wife and three children. Regular walks, likes to run. Never smoked.

Observations: resp rate 42 – 48 – 55 – 61 – 61 …

Those escalating numbers, written on a traffic-light chart, mean the patient was choking for air. It’s a story that ends in them unconscious and paralysed with machines replacing their failing organs, under my care.

I’m finding it a challenge to deal with patients who are so unwell because I wish this hadn’t happened to them. When you’re providing one-on-one care, it hardly registers that there are hundreds of people in the same position. We talk of curves and peaks but that has nothing to do with lived experience. Politicians and journalists now speak with the perspective of gods. They have an overview of the situation that I just cannot have. As a doctor I feel like an ant standing next to an elephant: I can barely make sense of what I see, and it’s hard to throw my tiny weight against it.

And where I am, the most limited resource is not the ventilators, it’s the bare-bones workforce. Up to 50% of our regular staff are off work through sickness, self-isolation and fear. I look around and see herculean efforts from my colleagues and it moves me.

It’s like someone gave my superheroes kryptonite but they’re still trying to lift the car, because what else can they do? I see the infectious disease consultant leading our response who has quietly taken off his crowning turban and for the first time in his life cut the beard he kept for his faith, removed in the name of infection control. His stature may be smaller but he is in no way diminished. I see a junior doctor drenched in urine that is bright-orange with rifampicin. She tried to change her first catheter because there was no one else to do it. Eight years of education hadn’t taught her that it’s easy to open the bag but a lot harder to close it. Everyone in the hospital is doing all we can to make these patients better. I see consultant surgeons working as house officers in ITU, while dentists and physios pitch in to “roll” patients – changing their position so they don’t sustain pressure injuries. My patients don’t know everything we are doing for them, their families can’t visit – no one sees it, but we aren’t holding anything back.

Our salvage treatment for critically unwell patients is “proning”: turning an intubated patient on to their front. Escalating care for the most severe cases is as humble and as mighty an act as rolling a patient on to their front.

Caring for a severely unwell Covid+ patient is not what you think. I’m so close to them – dripping eye drops under their lids at night, so their unblinking eyes don’t dry out. I may never meet them but I hold vigil over traces of their breath for signs they need help. I change their bedsheets from under them.

Everyone is so far out of their comfort zones. We are stretched so thin and trying so hard and here all the time. My country has moved from waiting for “herd immunity” – and accepting the human toll that might take – to throwing everything it can to minimise the loss of life, including me. And that is one bit of sense I can extract from this. I didn’t get to meet my patients but what I want to say to them, with all the force of my care is: It’s all for you, everything we have. Your life matters.