A M’sian Doctor Shares Her Experience After Two Months of Treating Covid-19 Patients in Sabah

Disclaimer: This article was edited and published by World of Buzz with permission from the original source.

Sabah is one of the states that has been most severely affected by Covid-19. Recently, a female doctor shared on her Facebook page of her experience working as a frontliner for two months in Sabah.

Sharing the experience, her post received 1,200 shares filled with positive comments from netizens.

According to Dr Atfina Ibrahim, she was assigned to the Emergency Department of Semporna Hospital for two months. Starting September 25 2020, that was when the state election (PRN) in Sabah took place.

The hospital that dr atfina was assigned to.

She wrote,

“2 months have passed. It means it has been 2 months since I have left my family in the peninsula. It’s time to go home. I will never forget this experience.”

“I was mentally and physically ready when I arrived in Pekan Semporna on the 25th of September. To be honest, I was shocked!! The cases are escalating but the situation in the city is as if nothing has happened? It’s full of people everywhere. Social distancing???

She said that is when the episode of #thelittleWuhan happened at Sabah.

Dr Atfina is one of the doctors that was sent to Sabah and has been assigned to work as part of the COVID-19 medical team there.

She recalls her experience while working there, how she needed to be dealing with the patients who came kept coming in, how she needed to be on-call on weekends and had to deal with 24 hour active calls at the emergency zone.

She also shared that at first, the situation seemed to be calm until patients start to show up one by one, even though she had to wear the Personal Protective Equipment (PPE) all the time, she was still able to hold a smile to hide her tiredness and perform her duty.

Dr Atfina also shares that there was a female patient who came with fever but had no signs of cough and cold. Her breathing was fast and she noticed there was black ink on the patient’s finger, indicating that she was one of the contacts of an existing COVID-19 patient. Already in stage 4, did not require intubation and still stable, but still needs to be sent to ICU admission.

X-ray of a covid-19 patient shared in dr atfina’s post.

Admitting the challenges she and other health workers faced, they did not have time to eat and drink, to go to the toilet, they don’t get enough rest, yet they put the patients’ priority at the top of the list.

Dr Atfina wrote,

“We are fighting against a virus that is invisible to the naked eye. Challenging. It is very challenging for me to survive on this covid threshold.”

“We are also human. This is a new norm that we have to get used to. Wearing a full PPE suit in the emergency ward for more than 9-10 hours at such a critical time. Not having time to eat and drink. Not even to the toilet. That is our challenge. I am exhausted and almost burned out.”

She also said that no matter where they all serve, the challenges are not the same. Every doctor and other medical teams have different responsibilities, but their goal remains the same, which is to break the Covid-19 chain.

Therefore, she asks for help from everyone to follow the SOP and apply it to the new norms so that their efforts all this time would not be wasted.

Also Read: 130yo Man In Sabah Who Died Of Covid-19 Is Allegedly The Oldest Person In The World