2020 VISION
From hero medics to author Michael Rosen’s recovery, 2020: The Story Of Us charts life in NHS hospitals under Covid
WHEELED out by staff wearing full protective gear, attached to an oxygen tank, children’s author Michael Rosen gripped his wife’s hand as if he could never let go.
It was the first time the pair had seen each other in five weeks, since the Going on a Bear Hunt writer had gone into intensive care with Covid-19.
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Fearing for Michael’s state, medics invited Emma-Louise to visit, hoping it would give him the impetus to go on - and that deeply personal moment, captured on film, proved transformative.
Shortly afterwards, Professor in Intensive Care Medicine Hugh Montgomery called Emma-Louise to tell her: “Whatever you did transformed him. It was extraordinary. He’s gone from strength to strength all week.”
It is just one of the scenes in an emotional and extraordinarydocumentary charting life in NHS hospitals in London and Lancashire in the first six months of the pandemic.
Under the expert helm of award-winning director 2020: The Story of Us lays bare the realities of Covid through powerful, personal testimonies from our amazing NHS workers and Michael’s beautifully poetic thoughts and memories.
Crying most nights
Dental nurse, Emma Jones, who switched from her usual role in oral surgery to help the Covid effort, tells of how her young daughter saw her return home crying most nights.
She describes the love that goes into cleaning a patient after they have died.
She says: “It does feel humbling. It’s the last thing you can do for somebody, and we all hope somebody would do it right for our loved ones.”
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Emma is haunted by seeing the wife and two young sons of a patient come to say goodbye.
Having lost her own mother 12 years ago, also on an ICU ward, she knew what they were going through.
She says: “I just can’t get the look of their faces out of my head. They looked so scared, because they knew what was coming.
“They looked lost and they looked frightened and I recognise that feeling.”
Tormented by sound of ventilators
We meet Intensive Care Sister Rowena Brown, who, at 4am, long after her shift has finished, can’t sleep because she is tormented by the sound of “ventilators going off, syringe drivers alarming.”
In another of her diary films, she is distraught about a brother and sister who lost both parents within two days of each other to the virus.
Professor Hugh Montgomery, at north London’s , is living apart from his family so he can keep them safe while battling 24-hour shifts.
Yet people are having picnics in parks, despite the Government’s stay at home order.
He says: “I have no idea whether they’re stupid, ignorant, don’t care and are selfish. I really cannot understand how this is happening.”
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The film is interspersed with news updates taking us through 2020 chronologically. A voice telling us the death tolls has passed ten thousand, fifteen thousand, twenty thousand...
More than 120,000 Brits have now died from the virus.
Around 42 per cent of intensive care patients at the Whittington didn't survive.
'I didn't get to say goodbye'
Devastatingly, Professor Montgomery lost his 17-year-old son, Oscar, during the year, not through Covid, but he believes it wouldn’t have happened had it not been for the pandemic.
When restrictions were eased to allow day trips, the keen snorkeller went to Portland Bill, Dorset, on a bright sunny day and drowned.
Prof Montgomery says: “I suppose that must be a little bit of what it’s been like for some people with their family in intensive care, in that they’ve had someone who suddenly goes from fit and healthy to dead.
“I didn’t get to say goodbye to Oscar. And I suppose there are people whose family’s members died in intensive care who neve had that chance either, and it hurts.”
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Tragically, it is something that both he and Michael Rosen share, as the former children's laureate lost his 18-year-old son, Eddie, to meningitis in 1999.
Diary to fill in the blanks
When Michael returns to meet the man who saved his life, Prof Montgomery questions whether it would have been better if his son had been ill for some time.
“There’s no better, there’s no better,” Michael says.
He recalls very little from his five weeks in hospital.
He says: “I remember somebody showing me a form and saying, ‘Are you okay to go on a ventilator?’ and telling me if I went on a ventilator I’d have a 50-50 chance of survival.
“I said, ‘What if I don’t go on the ventilator?’ and he said, ‘Zero.’ So I said, ‘Okay then,’ and I then I don’t remember anything else.”
A diary filled in by nurses has filled in some of the blanks in his memory during his 47 days in intensive care.
He says: “There’s this whole period of life that’s a complete blur.
“The nurses would write an entry for the day. So you get something like, ‘Happy birthday. You’ve been treated to a rendition of Happy Birthday from about fifteen ICU staff and one of the other patients.
“I’ve got no memory of that at all.”
All that care and belief and love keeping me in the world
Michael Rosen
Michael describes his vivid dreams, in which he imagined himself at a German Christmas party, where everyone was throwing purple berries that burst in the sky.
He says he can feel the “drumming of a washing machine from somewhere below” as he rests his head on his pillow, and pictures the bales of sheets and pyjamas being boiled clean.
When he returns to the hospital to meet the man who saved his life, a passing nurse is overjoyed to see Michael looking so well.
It makes him tearful, and he says later: “All that care and belief and love keeping me in the world.
“I look at Emma and try to tell her, but I’m often too upset to be able to say it and just put my hand over my eyes and cry.”
'I can't face going into crowds'
The film shows footage of medics kitted out in full PPE, wearing their names on their chests, performing a tracheotomy or ventilating frightened patients under plastic oxygen hoods.
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David Leahy, 55, a paramedic for the North West Ambulance Trust contracted Covid at the end of May last year.
He spent four weeks at the Royal Preston Hospital, Lancs., and returned to work in September.
He says: "It was very frightening, especially when you have the oxygen hood on. The noise of it and the pressure. I would get so anxious before they put it on, they had to give me medication to calm me down.";
He is physically and mentally altered by his near-fatal experience.
He says: "I get very out of breath, but one of my main issues now is anxiety.
"I am back at work, but not on frontline duty yet. I can't face going into crowded areas or going into people's houses.
"I think it's the shock of being so ill, that a switch goes in your brain to stop you from doing the things you did before.
"It's a form of post-traumatic stress disorder and I am having counselling, which is helping."
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Dr Shond Laha, Consultant in at the Lancashire Teaching Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust, kept video diaries for the documentary team, which he found therapeutic.
He says: "It was like debriefing myself; it was cathartic."
Dr Shond, 48, who saved David Leahy's life at the Royal Preston Hospital, found the most difficult part of his job was to break bad news to family members over the phone.
He says: "I would be in tears. I've seen some very tragic things in my work but I've never cried like that before.
"The inability to tell someone face to face that their loved one is dying is by far the worst thing I've ever had to deal with."
Could more people have been saved? I don't know.
Sister Rowena Brown
Medics phone family members to keep them updated, or in Michael Rosen's case, to ask his wife what music they should play him while he was in an induced coma.
Rowena says: “Half of the families are so grateful for the update, and then half are just screaming at you down the phone, putting blame on you that they couldn’t come in, or they’re just crying.
“It’s the people that were crying that really got to me.”
What hits you is the impact Covid has had on mental health, both for NHS workers and patients.
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At one point, Rowena films herself in the “wobble room,” where staff are encouraged to take themselves for a breather, when the stress and emotions of it all becomes too overwhelming.
She admits she feels “changed” by the traumatic year.
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In tears, she recalls: “I was watching people telling me they can’t breathe and I’m there saying, ‘I can’t help you.’ Could more people have been saved? I don’t know.”
It's a question too many of us will have asked this past year.
2020: The Story Of Us is on ITV1 at 9pm tonight, Tuesday, 16th March, and ITV Hub
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