Sitapur, Uttar Pradesh

It is not working 12-hour shifts tending to COVID positive patients that upsets staff nurse Sneh Singh. “That is my duty,” she said. “But, when I get back home and my toddler daughter comes to me with her arms outstretched, and I cannot gather her in my arms right away, it breaks my heart every single day, for the last one year of the pandemic,” the 32-year-old nurse told Gaon Connection, tearfully.  

Singh said she has not caught a break in the past one year since the pandemic. While professionally it has been an exhausting challenge to work during the pandemic in close quarters with COVID19 patients, happenings in her personal life have been turbulent too.  

Singh has been a nurse for seven years with the community health centre (CHC) at Biswan in Sitapur district, Uttar Pradesh, about 80 kilometres from the state capital Lucknow. But when the COVID 19 pandemic broke out last year, nurses across Uttar Pradesh had to put in 14 days at a time at L1 and the L2 COVID hospitals in the state. L1 hospitals treat the less severely affected COVID-19 patients while the L2 hospitals are those that treat the more critical cases. 

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Singh was on duty at an L2 hospital last year too, and her turn came up once again in 2021. She has just completed her two weeks duty at an L2 hospital at Khairabad, about 26 kilometres from Biswan, and has returned to the CHC at Biswa. 

Speaking to Gaon Connection on the International Nurses Day, Singh said: “When I was at the L2 hospital, it was tough. I had to travel twenty five kilometres by public bus every day to work from my home in Biswa to the L2 Covid Hospital at Khairabad,” she said. 

While the journey to and fro and the exhausting 12-hour duty at the hospital took its toll, the greatest wrench was leaving her one and a half year old daughter and her 7-year-old son, back home with her husband. She said there was always this undercurrent of anxiety and fear she had that she may carry the virus back home and infect her young family.

And the virus did strike her loved ones.

Her worst fears came true. While she was on duty at the CHC, her father who lived in Lakhimpur Kheri district about 50 kilometres away, died of COVID-19 last month in April. “I rushed home to comfort my mother and be with her,” Singh recalled. 

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While Singh was still recovering from losing her father to the virus, her husband, Ravi Singh, an insurance agent, also tested positive, earlier this month. Fearing for her kids, Singh immediately packed her children off to her sister. Her husband has recovered now.

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Amid all this crisis at her homefront, Singh ensured she reported for duty every single day and also completed her 14-day duty at the L2 hospital. 

Describing her days at the L2 hospital as challenging, she said, “Each shift was for twelve hours and only two nurses were allocated to tend to forty COVID patients.” But they did their job cheerfully, said Singh, despite keenly feeling the absence of more helping hands.   

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But Singh is pleased that she did inform the higher authorities about the shortage of hands and now each shift has an extra nurse attached. “It is of great help to have even just one more pair of extra hands,” she said.

It has taken seven years for Sneh’s salary to reach Rs 26,000 a month. She pays Rs 5,500 per month as house rent. When she was on COVID duty at Khairabad, her transportation was Rs 100 a day, which she paid from her own pocket. Besides this was the monthly electricity bill, provisions, etc. and of course medical expenses.  

“The job of a nurse is invaluable. It demands hard work, compassion and we put our lives on line,” Sneh said, and added, “Last year when I was on the fourteen-day COVID duty, I would get tea and biscuits at the hospital. We got nothing this year.”