WORKING DURING LOCKDOWN PART ONE BY ANDREA JOHNSON Leave a comment

So, I have been told many times, by many people, tell us your story of what you were doing over the lockdown period, they will be interested. This is what I am told, but will I come across as whinging? Probably. Do I have the right to whinge? Not really, but why shouldn’t I? I tell you what, you be the judge, because we live in a messed-up world where everything is topsy turvy and all our emotions are all over the place.
I must say that although I have tried to keep this fairly short, I have failed miserably and so this will split it into 2 parts and printed over two issues.
So where to start? at roughly the beginning I reckon is the best. So end of February ish?
There were news stories of Covid-19 reaching us, there was talk of us needing to go into lockdown for an unspecified period of time. I had things I needed to do quickly before I wasn’t allowed to do them anymore.
I have been working, on behalf of Den-Tech, with a lady called Dee Weavil who runs a medical centre over in Uganda called the Destiny Medical Centre, she had contacted us for help in setting up a fully functional dental laboratory in the medical centre to compliment the dental clinic that Dentaid were helping her establish within the centre. I had a shed load of donated materials and equipment from Den-Tech that I had to get to down to Southampton hopefully in time to beat the lockdown so it could be shipped. I hired a van, took a day off work and drove over 500 miles in a one day round trip to get it all collected up from various locations and dropped off in Southampton and back home again. Phew! Did that in time.
My daughter called me, she was studying her BSc hons at University of Manchester and said if this is all kicking off and I am going to have to go into lockdown I would rather do it at home. Yey! I drove to Manchester and picked my kid up and brought her home. This made me a happy mum, she was safe and well and at home with me.
Next I wanted to go and see my mum and sister who lives in North Wales – 2.5hr drive from my house in Nottinghamshire. My mum has COPD and no working immune system, would this be the last time I see her alive? I had no idea, at least one of my sisters lives only a 5 minute drive away from my mum so I knew she would be well looked after. My Sister and brother in law are key workers too though and still had to work and my mum was no longer allowed to look after my two nieces. Tricky, sad and stressful for all concerned. Also, what if they got ill and had to self-isolate? Who would look after my mum then? So many things to worry about but also I knew worrying would do no good, it would help no one so we just did what we could and knew we would have to deal with whatever happened when it happened. After all we had no idea how long or how serious any of this would be.
After seeing my mum and sister I returned home with only 2 days until the lockdown was official.
Pretty much straight after this our world was tipped upside down, all dental related work came crashing to a sudden halt, we had no idea how long for? What were we to do next? We were waiting on word from the Chief Dental Officers office, the government, my NHS trust etc as to what happens from here.
Now I am not going to get all political about this because the proverbial really did hit the fan for almost every industry and workplace out there, this was a unique situation and nobody had the faintest idea what we were doing, so ranting about that with the benefit of hindsight really is not fair. I just hope we take some serious lessons from this and are much better prepared should anything like this happen again.
Anyway, needless to say I still had a few cases in the lab that needed finishing off, so I cracked on with those while the world was in a frenzy around me. I had these finished within a few days and at the end of the week when I only had admin left to do I saw an opportunity to work from home rather than have the hour each way drive to and from work. Nice I thought……..
I let my line manager know my plans and headed off home for the evening, looking forwards to sitting on my PC in the comfort of my own home the next day and who knows for how many other days?
What a dreamer I was! I mean I work for the NHS for goodness sake.
That evening whilst walking my dogs, Phlo, Freda & Pip I got a call from my line manager. ‘Hiya Andrea, Can you head to the DRI site tomorrow please, you have been redeployed to the fit testing team, they are really up against it and need all the help they can get right now.’ ‘Sigh’ so much for working at home. BUT I am a proud NHS worker and helping is what I do so I agreed with no arguments and headed off to the education centre the next day ready to be trained up as a fit tester.
Now you may think this is a cushy number, stashed away in the education centre away from any danger fitting a few masks. O.M.G! Nothing at all like that! It was crazy town, we have thousands of staff needing fit testing, a very erratic and unpredictable supply of masks of varying types and an education centre full of noobs having a crash course in fit testing.
To be fair they were all super lovely people who I was now working with, the normal team who did the fit testing were needed elsewhere to train up more staff who had been redeployed into other areas, staff were being moved all over the place, walls were being put up left, right and centre within the hospital to block off key ‘yellow’ covid areas and ‘blue’ non covid areas it was chaos, organised chaos but still.
In a very short time I was made one of the senior fit testing team members and was running and supervising quite large fit testing teams on a daily basis.
I now had to work in shifts which is new for me, days, evenings, weekends, bank holidays etc – one day was very much the same as the other. Weekends meant nothing as it was quite often just another workday and the days were a good 12 hours long too. I was allowed no annual leave at all. If you had any booked it was cancelled. It was all available hands to the pumps in the NHS. The amount of staff that came in and were saying I am supposed to be here or there on holiday right now was quite sad but it’s not like we could travel anywhere anyway so we were in the same boat as everyone else in that respect.
Now I will leave it there for now so I don’t take up to many the pages in the magazine with me, me and oh yeah me but I will continue telling you about my fit testing journey and bring you up to date in the next issue. Until then stay safe and take care, Andrea.

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