The fear ..and the fury

Doctor tells why story of those risking lives on Covid front line must be told

THERE was a moment, standing on set when I started to feel my chest constricting. We’d turned three stories of a disused college campus in Belfast into an NHS hospital complete with Covid ward, ICU and A&E.

The attention to detail was phenomenal. Stains on the ceilings, scuffs on the walls. The long scratches you see inside the entrance of every A&E made by trolleys bashing in from the ambulances outside over the years.

But nothing prepared me for the experience of watching the cameras beginning to roll. Suddenly it all came back, the alarms, the monitors, the claustrophobia, the fear. Joanne Froggatt – stunningly authentic in the lead role as Dr Abbey Henderson – was there on screen, visibly struggling to suppress her fear as she fumbled with her PPE and faced our fictional hospital’s first suspected case of Covid.

I remembered walking, like her, towards a stricken patient whose every breath, you were horribly aware, might end up claiming your life too.

I remembered the colleagues who came up to me at work to ask me to witness them signing their wills – wills they had hastily drawn up in case they died from Covid.