"When I had volunteered for COVID services, I knew I was putting a lot at stake--my health, my family’s safety, my time to relax, time I would spend with my family--but that was the starting of the pandemic. And we had everything under control or so it seemed.

I still got days off when I could spend time with my family, the tidal wave of patients was not there, there were fewer critical cases and I could delegate responsibilities to my junior team etc., but now that seems like a dream long faded. 

Since the start of May, patients have been continuously coming to the hospital as if a wave has brought them in..they are not trickling in...they are coming in hoards. And we, first response team, is just running around all the time. There are days when I realise that I have sat down on a chair only possibly for half an hour during lunch and that at the end of the shift my feet are red, swollen and painful and on some days, I eat my lunch also on the go...no chance of sitting down either!
Amongst all this, I have lost touch with my family’s happenings..initially I was staying in the hospital quarters and every 15 days I was sent home to quarantine and recover, but now even that has changed. Now I can come home everyday, at my own risk, and report the next morning for duty.

But am I really home? It doesn’t seem so. I have lost all sense of time and space and work-life balance seems a myth to me. My home and workplace are just merging borders. I don’t have an identity outside the workplace or any relationships left outside work. I was frustrated, always high-strung, irritable and cranky. My negative emotions were outflowing on my family, whom I perhaps met only for breakfast that too on some days, and sometimes on patients too whom I ended up scolding for not being careful enough.

I was at a burnout stage and would have collapsed with stress one day when my team leader noticed my distress and sent me in for counselling.

What I learnt from my interaction with the counsellor was that seeking work life balance was sending my brain the subtle message that work was bad and life was good and life only happened when there was no work...something impossible to put in the context of COVID.

Instead she suggested that I try to integrate rather than separate all my daily activities, [and] harmonize rather than divide my time.

She told me to restructure my purpose of joining the COVID team. It can’t be just to serve people, but to realign it to my goals and my family’s needs. To understand that I joined COVID team to get more work, and earn money and not just help patients get better. She also advised me that I needed to expand my boundaries of family and include and look at my staff as my family rather than work colleagues. Also, dissolving the physical barriers of work and home--why do I have to be practically standing in my house to feel at home, why can’t I reorient my thinking into accepting a video call with my family as being practically there with them--would help me feel more balanced. Her best bit of advise was to bring a bit of work to home and a bit of home to work--the  music I enjoyed listening at home is now always with me, when I get a short break, I quickly go through my daughter’s assignments and email the feedback to her, and at home, I feel no guilt if I have to invest some time in researching some medical news.

I am not quite there, but her suggestions are definitely bringing me back into a space where I am more in control of my peace of mind and feel calmer and less like a headless chicken running between my work and home," shares Dr Kriti Chawla, working in a COVID hospital in Delhi.

(Pic credit: stories/freepik)