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.
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.
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.”
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.
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.
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.