Thanks blahblah/Jester. (Although I should be doing my FISODAS entry so if I lose, I blame you Jester
)
Covid jabs I've heard quoted between £45 - £100, I suspect some would see the lower end as a price worth paying. Now I've just had it I'll worry about that next year when hopefully they're cheaper! My flu jab was £15 or £16 as mentioned, they should be readily available at Boots or Tesco - you even get Advantage or Clubcard points, believe it or not!
As for covid....well. Admittedly I'm much less frequent in these parts than several years ago but I simply didn't dare look in case I saw posts that would have incensed/upset me. I don't have any time for covid deniers, to put it mildly! Mrs Pap saw the headlines from China and then Italy and knew what was coming. I can say that when the first handful of cases landed in the UK and we had a handful of hospitals set up to deal with them - remember the coaches driving the passengers to them when they weren't wearing any form of protection? - her unit had to send a suspected case over to Liverpool (as one of the centres). They got to Liverpool and the first thing the nurses there said to her colleagues was "What the f*** are you wearing?!" because they had no PPE. That wasn't due to shortages but a lack of knowledge/guidance - though everything you ever heard subsequently about PPE shortages was true.
Imagine being told that you'd have to share masks/filters with colleagues and that it was just like snogging someone. Yes, a manager actually said that. The unit was expanded and became 100% covid patients. Staff were pulled in from wherever and the actual ICU nurses had to direct them because they weren't ICU trained. That's why everything else pretty much had to stop because of the resource demands to look after all the covid patients.
Mrs Pap actually handed her notice in as it began. She simply couldn't face the possibility of bringing covid into the house and killing our kids, that's how scared she was. She was given some time to consider it and offered the chance to work on a non-ICU unit. She withdrew her notice and decided to stay in ICU, reasoning that the protection she'd get there would be better than on say the cardiac unit where the PPE and requirements were less stringent. Much better. she reasoned, to put up with invasive and deeply uncomfortable PPE but feel safer.
That's the briefest of summaries of what it was like. She saw countless covid deaths and how indiscriminate it was. ICU nurses are used to death of course, but fit and healthy people are the exception rather than the norm. That didn't (doesn't?) apply with covid. It was utterly grim, essentially.
