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As part of our Evening Standard Everyday Heroes project we interviewed and photographed seven front line NHS workers involved in the fight against Covid 19.
For the past three and a half years, Asha Bhulia has worked at the hospital caring for patients reaching the end of their lives. ‘Our main aim is to try and improve quality of life, control symptoms, pain, breathlessness, nausea and vomiting,’ she explains. ‘We also care for them holistically, looking after the psychological, emotional and physical elements of how their illness affects them.’
From March onwards Bhulia’s work accelerated rapidly as the hospital was inundated with people infected with Covid 19. ‘So many more patients were nearing the end of their life,’ she says. ‘I remember being on call with a list of patients to see but by the time I got to the ward they had died. There was no time to process that emotionally because there were more patients to see and you wanted to care for as many people as possible.’
The staff were fuelled by adrenaline, says Bhulia, who lives with her parents is north east London. ‘You want to power on and see as many patients as possible. It only hits when you get home and you sit down and realise how exhausted you are. That’s how it was for most of my colleagues too.’
At first, she watched the news a lot, ‘everybody’s fear was that the NHS would get to breaking point. But then I became so busy at work that I watched less because I was living it.’
‘We know how to deal with breathlessness and help with pain but we didn’t know this disease and we didn’t know whether there would be an end point,’ she says. ‘It’s not just a physical strain, it’s an emotional strain. It changed everything about how we do our jobs.’
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