She is Dead
She is dead. The phrase I had uttered without hesitation during my time as the resident doctor in Palliative Medicine were the same words I was trying to avoid saying. She, a middle-aged mother of one, on life-support a few wards away from where I stood, had ceased her struggle with the virus . Sitting before me, occupying a bed each opposite each other were what was left of the woman’s nuclear family. Her son on one side and her husband on the other side of a Covid general ward. The situation where, amidst a global calamity, entire families were admitted to the hospital, where a Psychiatry resident was called upon to care for medically unwell patients, wearing a dehydrating space-suit seemed something out of a dystopian novel. But the terrible update I was privy to wrung me back to the pages of reality. The nursing staff and I were in possession of the knowledge that the third member (first?) of this small family was no more. The husband eagerly pulled out an old di