So I’ve seen many of my former colleagues catching it, even after two doses of vaccine. I’ve now had the booster as well so it’s triple. From a precaution point of view, I’m very conscious that I’m still probably at a higher level of risk so I’m consciously trying to avoid going to work in areas in the hospital where they treat Covid patients. So this is one of the reasons why I haven’t returned to ED, although this was a consensus between me and the management saying that probably it’s safer for you to, so, initially, I was I was redeployed to another area and I have found this job advert and I said, “Okay, I love this kind of job so I would I would love to jump in.” So, first of all, I’m trying to consciously avoid going into zones and areas where I can be exposed or possibly highly exposed to this infection. On the other hand, I told myself that I can’t live my life in fear so I’m just going to do everything in my power to protect myself and my family but, other than that, I’m just going to live my life to the full. I’m just going to go to work not constantly thinking about, what if I’m going to get it? What if I’m going to get it? No, I’m just going to carry on with my work. I’m just going to carry on with my life and we just have to learn to live with this new reality. And for me, this new reality was a bit more harsh compared to other people but I still have to learn with it and I can tell you I’m not afraid of going to work. I’m not afraid of returning to the same environment and to deal with it, although I’m still super cautious.

I was backing up this campaign and one of my social media posts was, for example, showing a picture of me back in April 2020 with an oxygen mask on my face and I put the inscription, this was six days after I was tested positive with Covid-19 and another picture from January 2021 completely healthy and smiling and I said, this is six days after I got my vaccine. So, I was I was trying to promote this message that this is the way out of this pandemic by adhering to these measures, by taking the vaccine and this is not just for our own benefit, but we have the kind of social responsibility for others. And it was it was so good to hear a lot of positive feedback from people, from people that I know or even don’t know telling me that, “I’ve took the vaccine because of you. I took things more seriously because I’ve heard your story.”

I was really doubting myself that I’m going to make it just by staying home. So, when this little pulse oximeter has arrived, we popped it on my finger and I was shocked to see that my oxygen level were around eighty percent, which was way below even for, way below normal even for someone who has a respiratory condition such as COPD or asthma. Then, when I started walking up the stairs, those oxygen levels went even lower down to approximately sixty five, seventy percent, so that was the moment when my wife said, “This is a no brainer. We need to call the ambulance.”

And I remember I had a very, very strong panic attack willing to just take the tube out of my throat because I couldn’t bear it anymore. And I just asked one of the nurses with a written messages that can you just sit next to my bed and can you hold my hand for a minute or two. And she was so kind. She sat next to me. She was just holding my hand. She wasn’t saying anything. And we stayed like that for like two, three minutes and that anxiety that panic just moved away and, as a nurse, being a patient probably this was one of one of those little things which reminded me that sometimes minor things that we do for our patients seem nothing for us but it means everything for that patient. And that nurse holding my hand for two minutes, in that moment, meant everything for me.

One of the changes that they have done in the department was we had a so called red zone and blue zone. So red zone was where all the Covid positive patients were admitted, and the blue zone was where the one which were likely to be negative. And I can remember it was a struggle within the team very often when they put you into the red zone, so I know that many, many people were very frightened to, frightened to work in the red zone. And very often I said, “I don’t mind.” Just as I said, why should I be afraid? I’m wearing the PPE. I’m relatively young so this is going to be likely to affect those people who have a pre-existing medical condition, they are old and so on and so on. So, we had these pre-conceptions about this whole disease, about this whole virus. And I think, and this was the feedback I had received from most of my colleagues, they said, “Up until, Laszlo you got sick, we didn’t thought that this pandemic can get so serious. That was that was the tipping point for us to believe that this can happen to anyone. No one is completely safe no one can say that I am immune to this and that was the moment when we took things more seriously. So, I think even my story in this sort of way made a big change in the culture in the department and in the whole hospital.

And, because my background is in emergency medicine, and, at that time, I was working as an emergency nurse at [hospital], we knew that whatever escalation this virus, this disease is going to have, we will be the first line of defence. We will be the first people to see these patients flowing into the healthcare system.