Image is for illustration only.  I am not a medic.

Recently I have spent a number of hours each week working at my local hospital.  It’s certainly been eye-opening and I have so much respect for my colleagues who have worked at the front line for the entirety of this pandemic thus far.

But what has struck me most, and something I’m privileged to witness, is the diversity of relationships that I’m party to during my time there.

There is the obvious patient/clinician relationship, and all staff are trained to help patients who are anxious and worried at this time, to ensure their visit to the hospital, however long, is as comfortable and stress-free as possible.  Something that requires a lot of resilience in these testing times as procedures seem to change with each new news report.

Then you see the parent/child relationship.  Where I’m working it’s often mid-life children accompanying their elderly parents.  A generation who as war babies were the most vulnerable at the time of their birth and now once again, find themselves among the most vulnerable in our society.

Then there’s the couples; young and old, long and short term.  The young couples barely seem to talk to each other, heads down glued to their mobile phones giving silent moral support in their joint isolation.  And the elderly couples, worried about what news may be imparted to their loved one, looking after each other with an enduring love that so many of my clients seek for themselves.  They will often have spent the entire day at the hospital for one short appointment with a clinician who could potentially change the course of their life.

And I see the couples where there is obviously conflict or abuse, often the individual won’t even recognise that the conflict is there but for someone finely tuned to detect it, it’s obvious.  I see myself in the women or men who present scared of their own shadow, their partner doing all of the talking for them and complaining if their appointment is more than just a few minutes late because they, not the patient, are being inconvenienced.

I relish talking to the patients, giving a smile, behind my mask, ensuring it reaches my eyes.  Making what I hope is a reassuring gesture to those who arrive worried and anxious.  And doing all I can to make their brief interaction with me as pleasurable as possible.  For those who can’t walk without assistance and have a long wait, I fetch water from the water cooler, and I’ve assisted those who can’t read or write to complete forms that are confusing enough for the most literate of us.

You see all of life in a hospital, the good, the bad and the ugly; but for me, the best parts of wearing PPE and having the constant sting and smell of hand sanitiser as company, is giving random acts of kindness to worried strangers, and observing the myriad of relationships that play out day by day in the midst of a pandemic serving as solid reminders that life really does carry on amidst the ebb and flow of whatever nature throws at us, and that strong, healthy and robust relationships can endure whatever adversity is pushed across their path.