We all know that the last 6 months have been tough. I am married to a front line NHS worker so we had been following the growth of this illness for some time. It was clear that things were going to be bad from mid February. I had read stories of what was happening in the hospitals of Northern Italy and could see it was only a matter of time before it was over here. Nicky was battling with getting decent PPE and the right to wear it on wards with coughing patients still waiting for a diagnosis taking days to come through.
I was still teaching at Hereford College of Arts. The last day before lockdown, as I walked to the station I overheard two students behind me talking; they talked about how they wouldn’t mind getting ‘IT’ because they could do with ‘a bit of a skive’. I was so angry I couldn’t turn to look at them. They were young and naïve but I thought of the older people in their lives and how they might be affected by the illness.
Nicky led from the front and was one of the first of her team to dress up like an astronaut and go onto ITU. She works in cardiology and Covid does horrible things to your heart; echocardiograms were in high demand. The first time she went up there she said it was like a war zone; she was clearly shaken; she stopped talking about what was going on during the 12 hour shifts day and night.
I was at home feeling fairly helpless. I am zooming away to my students from Hereford trying to keep them positive and working, but in comparison to what Nicky was doing it felt very small.
I am a quilter; that’s what I do. So I decided to quilt and this piece is the result.
I started with a simple ‘Stay Safe’ and then another for my sister, but I knew that I wanted to make a bigger more considered piece.
It says what I wanted to say to those two young people.
