YouSaid · the spoken record

Roopa Farooki

lines on the record: 30
first: 2022-01-21
most recent: 2022-01-21
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“Patients. But there's also a duty of candor. You owe them the truth, and I believe that very strongly. You know, I always tell my patients what is happening with them. I even have that difficult discussion if I think that they've now, in a fight that they can't win. And I felt that this story, this accountant that I wrote, is probably better described as a romance because I think it was Hawthorne who said that once you make a decision to call a story romance, then it doesn't dare to veer from the truth. And I think the stories in this book are of those that we love, those who we cared for. And I think when you do that, it's no longer centered on me or on them. It's about that connection. So what I really want people to take from this account that I've written, from this romance between the carers and those who are cared for, is that that connection is important despite all our flaws and our fragility and our failing.”
2022-01-21 · Intelligence Squared · The Pandemic on the Page, with Roopa Farooki · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The bar is low that you would settle for anything that you would settle for less. And obviously watching the deterioration of a person isn't the same as watching the deterioration of an institution. But during the pandemic, I think we learned more and more to settle for less. So I felt that we were putting up with less PPE, we were putting up with having all our holidays cancelled. We were putting up with being told with hours notice to come in and work a day whether or not we were free wasn't even asked. And we did it. Because we wanted to support, we have this huge collegiate belief in this thing that we actually want to do something right and look after our patients and do the very best we can. In terms of what do I want people to take from this book, I wouldn't really describe this as a book as such. It was more of an account because I wanted us to be accountable to each other, to ourselves. I think as a clinician, yes, you have a duty of care towards your”
2022-01-21 · Intelligence Squared · The Pandemic on the Page, with Roopa Farooki · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The idea of how quickly we settle for less that was something that I felt very strongly when I was watching my sister deteriorate. I remember thinking that, okay, she can't really laugh out loud anymore, but maybe she'll smile and we can't have a long conversation anymore. But maybe, you know, she'll just sort of, you know, have a chat or say good morning. She can't really share her favorite cakes with us anymore, but maybe she'll just sort of look at them or smell them or, you know, nibble the corner. And all the things that used to do together, laugh and have conversations and share your favorite ghetto and that sort of thing became, you know, became diminished. So it became just hoping for that sleepy smile, hoping for that word of acknowledgement, hoping for a kind of a look of pleasure that you've brought something that she used to like to eat. And you realize how”
2022-01-21 · Intelligence Squared · The Pandemic on the Page, with Roopa Farooki · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think at a certain point it felt like the leadership and the government were only interested in the NHS and the medical profession as far as they could use it to further their own political ground to actually gain political advantage. And it started way back even”
2022-01-21 · Intelligence Squared · The Pandemic on the Page, with Roopa Farooki · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“hand care actually looking after the people who when there was no one else there to. I think it just shows just an incredible lack of respect and it's kind of quite sad for me a couple of years on having written this book to actually kind of find out that's really what was going on. It's what we suspected, but for it to have been so blatant, I think it's upsetting for everyone.”
2022-01-21 · Intelligence Squared · The Pandemic on the Page, with Roopa Farooki · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“There aren't words for it. When I saw this current news cycle and the reports that kept spiraling downwards, that they were kind of more and more parties and less and less respect. And this is from those who actually should have some kind of respect and duty of care towards those that they are pretending to govern. They're really no words for it, are they? It felt like we'd slipped into a dystopian kind of Orwellian world, a kind of autocracy where, yes, all animals are equal, but some are more equal than others. And it's pretty clear who the pigs are, aren't they? So it's not really something I dealt with in the book, but I think my kind of anger towards leadership, towards those who are purporting to actually be guiding us in this situation and their lack of diligence and their lack of care and lack of duty towards those of us who were actually at the kind of the hard end of it providing patient care, providing that hand-on.”
2022-01-21 · Intelligence Squared · The Pandemic on the Page, with Roopa Farooki · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Things in the pandemic actually, you know, because I instinct as humans is to want to touch and hold and to be there, to be present. And the fact that we were actually asking people to be absent as their way of protecting their loved one, it's not intuitive at all and emotionally it was very difficult to kind of explain that and even for ourselves to, I guess, police it. And then when you realize these sacrifices that everyone made try and keep their loved ones safe to try and keep the staff safe in hospitals, to try and keep the patient safe, by staying away, by following the rules, and then we find out that actually leadership, that government leadership who are actually making the rules, while we were telling someone that they couldn't come in and hold their mother's hand, they were actually having genetic and parties in the basement. They were not leading by example and actually contributing to the spread of virus. It's just shocking. I think it's actually really, really...”
2022-01-21 · Intelligence Squared · The Pandemic on the Page, with Roopa Farooki · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Think that one of the hardest things as a healthcare professional, as a clinician during the pandemic was this separation of family from their loved ones in their hardest moments. On the ward, I saw this a lot where we basically had to keep families away from their loved ones in order to protect them and equally also to protect the staff as well. And even though we were trying to stick to the rules and trying to prevent the spread from COVID in the community to prevent the spread among patients from families, it still felt like a very difficult conversation and I felt that there were many moments stolen in many families' lives when they should have been at their loved one side during their last moments. They should have had those conversations. And many times I tried to be the hand for that patient to hold when they'd loved and wasn't there when they were speaking to someone as we are speaking now through a screen. I think that was one of the hard”
2022-01-21 · Intelligence Squared · The Pandemic on the Page, with Roopa Farooki · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Then I actually thought, you know, they'll be all right because they've already learned that lesson. They know that mothers can die. They've seen it with my sister. One day they'll see it with me. And that's okay. We kind of learned that, yes, we will all grow old because the alternative would be, you know, we know what the alternative is and we will all die. And it's quite funny because they actually said, yeah, of course everyone has to die. The alternative will be horrible. It'd be like a zombie apocalypse walking around So I kind of know it's kind of a dark way of looking at it, but we kind of understood that.”
2022-01-21 · Intelligence Squared · The Pandemic on the Page, with Roopa Farooki · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Forward planning to a whole new level there. No, it was great. That was like, you know, loads of vegetarian, which is vegetarian, loads of vegetarian biryani. It was like, you know, it was really, really well planned. So I think that being able to kind of address that, not to think of it as something terrifying, but just something that, you know, that happens to us all. And weirdly, I think my children help me as well because they learnt when my sister passed away that everyone dies, that, you know, even mothers can die. And when I was going into the hospital every day and thinking, oh my God, what am I doing? What if I bring back a virus? What if I, you know, what if I get it? What if I am one of the ones who actually ends up lined up against a wall and goes because of this?”
2022-01-21 · Intelligence Squared · The Pandemic on the Page, with Roopa Farooki · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Really trained in how to lose someone, you know, we're trained so well to keep them with us. And it's something I think maybe.”
2022-01-21 · Intelligence Squared · The Pandemic on the Page, with Roopa Farooki · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's difficult for me because I have a lot of respect for my palliative colleagues and the palliative nurses and everything they do in my own trust. My own experience, though, as not as a clinician, but as a patient relative, it was really, really hard. And I guess it is hard when it's personal. But during my sister's last few weeks, it felt like every question we asked and every concern we had was kind of all the response we got was that same sort of slightly head-turned sympathy kind of look and the same kind of form medications that were being offered. And that head cocked to the side. I'm so sorry, but there's nothing you can do about it. And I know it's hard day by day. And that was before the pandemic, but it is difficult to deal with death. And, you know, for people who choose to go into the branch of medicine where they have to kind of manage it day by day, I'm sure it's really hard. I think all of us, we are not.”
2022-01-21 · Intelligence Squared · The Pandemic on the Page, with Roopa Farooki · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, you know, we couldn't have imagined quite what would happen and how our personal tragedy would be so kind of subsumed into something nationally. But at least when someone lost someone, I could say, honestly, I've felt that too. And when someone said, you know, I'm worried about the people I'm leaving behind, I could say, I've been left behind. And, you know, it's okay. They'll get by because day after day you do. You just kind of put one foot in front of the other and you get by. It's not that life Moscow has just said it does.”
2022-01-21 · Intelligence Squared · The Pandemic on the Page, with Roopa Farooki · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Felt was being felt by everyone, and when someone was losing someone, I remember one lady on the ward who was diagnosed and she would go to die shortly and she was more worried about her children. And I could empathize, my sister lost her children, you know, was going to lose her children because she was going to pass away. And the thing that worried her most when she was towards her last days was this was before we really paid attention to what was happening with the pandemic was that her children might actually plough their exams, that they might not get great grades because they were worried about her. That was her biggest fear that someone might lose out on university place or do badly in A-levels or not do well in their first year of exams. And instead, her daughter didn't even make it back to Cambridge after she passed away. She was away for two, you know, she'd spent the whole of the first term at her mother's bedside. And then after Kirina passed away, she was only, I think, I think back for a week or so before everyone had to come back.”
2022-01-21 · Intelligence Squared · The Pandemic on the Page, with Roopa Farooki · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And just by this incredible kind of unlucky circumstance, it just happened to be her that got picked out. And I was trying to kind of make sense of this, which is when I started the writing. And at the point of writing about my own grief, and you know, I guess that's what comes across as a prologue in the book. The COVID pandemic unleashed itself around us. It was like a flood. So I was there just grappling with kind of my own tears and then it was everybody else's. And my loss was just one loss threaded into this whole kind of tapestry of what everyone else was feeling. Because first it was Sophia and then it was the pain and then it was losing people and then we just kept losing people. And so my personal tragedy was somehow kind of diluted in this kind of sea of other people, of everyone else's tears. And in a way that helped because it wasn't about me. It was about all of us.”
2022-01-21 · Intelligence Squared · The Pandemic on the Page, with Roopa Farooki · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Actually, working and helping and looking after other people actually made sense to me. It was something that I could do. And it kind of helped me kind of get over, I think, the early stages of grief where actually you don't want to do anything. So it definitely made me kind of more dedicated as a doctor every kind of spare moment was given to care. I remember thinking taking 10 minutes to eat a sandwich at my rolling laptop while looking up patient investigations felt like quite luxurious that I was somehow kind of like, you know, getting away with it by just even doing that. So I think that was helpful. In terms of the emotional impact, I started writing the book a few weeks in when I was trying to kind of unravel what it was that I was feeling with all this kind of grief and anger about the loss of my sister, about the kind of incredible unfairness to lose someone so young, so healthy with absolutely, you know, with so much to live.”
2022-01-21 · Intelligence Squared · The Pandemic on the Page, with Roopa Farooki · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I don't know about better, but I guess it made me more dedicated, certainly, and in a strange way, for anyone who, you know, when you lose someone, it's so hard to carry on. And I was actually weirdly grateful to the ward for not giving me time to think the whole length of my 13-hour shift because the one day I did go in they told me not to go in the day after her funeral I went in anyway and they just took one look at me and sent me home and that never happens all ward is really really busy and you need every person you can get but they saw something that I didn't then they just like you know sent me back and I was useless that day I was just like came home and I just puddled into my boots I was just frankly a bag of organs on the floor I did nothing useful I wasn't helpful to myself to my children and I obviously wasn't even helping my colleagues on the ward and the next day I pulled myself together and went back in and maybe it was just a way of pushing the grief away but”
2022-01-21 · Intelligence Squared · The Pandemic on the Page, with Roopa Farooki · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Generating proceeding wards a few weeks into that, you know, much like you, we've got everyone got moved back onto COVID or medicine.”
2022-01-21 · Intelligence Squared · The Pandemic on the Page, with Roopa Farooki · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I mean, I was a very junior doctor at the start. I'm now an internal medicine trainee, so I'm on call, I'm on the medical take in AE, and I rotate through different aspects of medicine. So at the moment, I'm on geriatrics, and then I'll be back on the intensive care unit next time. And I actually started my foundation training in ITU. So that's how I could do the things like the arterial lines and the central lines. And so on. So when I actually started, when I was in my foundation training, I was in medicine. I was in acute medicine. And I was due to rotate on to surgery, but obviously that never happened because of the pandemic. So I just stayed where I was. And so I was either on the acute medical boards or on the acute medical taking A&E. So I was either admitting people into the medical part of the hospital from A&E or looking after them once I got them onto the ward. That was pretty much what all that I was doing. And then later on, actually, I did have a pediatrics rotation a bit after the journey of the book, but got redeployed into the COVID area.”
2022-01-21 · Intelligence Squared · The Pandemic on the Page, with Roopa Farooki · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“40 days on is when I just couldn't write it anymore, really. I'd already gone through COVID. I was a bit kind of woolly in my head at that point. And I'd felt and I hoped that at the end of those 40 days we were turning a corner, that people were starting to kind of come a little bit blinking into the light. There were shots on TV of people sitting in parks with, you know, maybe a park bench between them with a bottle of champagne in the middle. And there was a sort of sense of hope that the antibody test, which seemed a big deal at the time, was coming, proving that you'd had COVID and that would somehow change things a little bit. So that's how the quarantine, the 40 days, somehow kind of wrapped itself into my writing.”
2022-01-21 · Intelligence Squared · The Pandemic on the Page, with Roopa Farooki · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's been like for them. I had a friend in Italy who was like, you know, going through everything that we were going through a couple of weeks beforehand, going through what was happening in the hospital, singing from the, you know, listening to the singing from the balconies. And so that's what I meant by the 40 days, the quarantine, because originally the original meaning of quarantine, quarantine French is 40. And the original meaning is for 40 days of isolation to prevent the spread of contagious disease. It was originally used for keeping boats in harbour for 40 days. And it seemed to make sense that when we were looking at the lockdown, that's something, that's what we were really trying to do, hold this virus off to try and prevent the spread of infectious disease as a nation. We were trying to come together in collegiate way, try and do when we kind of started and maintained the lockdown. And so I started writing the book from the day before lockdown. And at the point of about”
2022-01-21 · Intelligence Squared · The Pandemic on the Page, with Roopa Farooki · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I hadn't originally intended to keep a 40 day account and 40, it felt at a certain point in the pandemic. It felt kind of big and biblical. And the truth is that when we were going through all of this, Italy had actually already started. So, you know, the wittering and the complaints from government that they didn't really know what was going to happen and they couldn't have been better warned. In fact, it was already happening. It was already reflected in a mirror very, very close to us. And I wasn't aware enough of what was going on. I was really much too wrapped up in my grief and with losing my sister. But I know that there were others who back in January were following what was happened in Italy and who knew that from a few dozen deaths in a couple of weeks on, what the trajectory would look like, that it would be kind of logarithmic, that it would be incredible. And so the idea of the 40 days is just something that it just sort of touched me, really, especially when Italy passed their 40 days halfway through when I was writing. And I was thinking, this is...”
2022-01-21 · Intelligence Squared · The Pandemic on the Page, with Roopa Farooki · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“They always wanted to do it now. So that's what I did. And that's why I was like, you know, a grown-up studying A-level chemistry and physics and biology.”
2022-01-21 · Intelligence Squared · The Pandemic on the Page, with Roopa Farooki · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Medicine exam with. And what I did was I delivered my sixth novel and just studied. I took some books out of the library, studied up to first year undergrad, biology, physics, and chemistry because I had no A-levels in any of the sciences. And then I sat the exam with all the science grads. And I came in the top 3% in the country. And within about half an hour of my results coming out, I got my interviews from med school. So that was quite amazing. I was a bit late actually because I'd intended to go a few years before, but I thought there's no way I can go to medical with four children aged five and under. So I waited till my twins were three and then I started. So I was like quite a few years behind where I wanted to be when I finally got into medicine. But you know what? I just kind of thought if it ever and you know a lot of people told me you've already got a job, you've already got his career, you're already quite a well-end writer and I was probably the most successful I'd ever been as a writer at the point when I applied for medical school. But I kind of thought if you're ever going to do it, this”
2022-01-21 · Intelligence Squared · The Pandemic on the Page, with Roopa Farooki · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And I worked at Sachi and Sachi and at J. Walter Thompson as a worldwide account director. And the jobs, even though I did lots of accounts, like, you know, Posh things like Rolex where you got to go to Wimbledon.”
2022-01-21 · Intelligence Squared · The Pandemic on the Page, with Roopa Farooki · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Up with, and will I be asked to leave the country? It's really strange. You kind of never quite lose that sense, however much, you know, if you've been educating the country, brought up there, contributed to it, paid your tax, married someone British, you still wonder at one point do you really get to belong? And I think that's something that, I know, I think I probably address that in the book. In a lot of my writing, really. But then I got a scholarship to a really good school in London called St. Paul's, which was great. And I did exams to get in. And even though I wanted to become a doctor and in my old school, I was the strongest in the sciences, I'm still stronger in the arts. And I came best in English history, French, and maths in their entrance exam. So that's why I ended up doing my A-level sin, which were paid for by the school. And with those A-levels, you can't really go and do medicine. So I went and did PPE at Oxford. So even though I couldn't be a doctor then, I actually still tried to put kind of medicine into other things that I was doing. Then I went into advertising.”
2022-01-21 · Intelligence Squared · The Pandemic on the Page, with Roopa Farooki · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“My dad was quite parapathetic before he met my mum, and he'd like studied in Switzerland and went all over Europe and so on. So they ended up in London. They were there on a visitor's visa. And in fact, when they had kids, we were all there on, I think, a visitor's visa that got renewed every six months until I was 16 years old and became a British citizen finally. So that was kind of complex growing up. Part of, you know, every time you sort of went abroad, I remember one time not being let back into the country and thinking what would happen and thinking, oh, will I get to go to school tomorrow? You don't really kind of take into account those sort of things when you're little, but every few months I thought, oh, are we going back to Pakistan and going back to a place I'd left when I was a baby was always quite strange for me? But until I was 16, that's sort of the way you just sort of had to think. So it's kind of, even though I had quite a stable kind of schooling, there was this kind of, you know, sense in the back of my head at any point you could be thrown out. And I got to say, with the current bill going through Parliament, past me always still wonders at one point will I get caught.”
2022-01-21 · Intelligence Squared · The Pandemic on the Page, with Roopa Farooki · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“If it doesn't sound too indulgent, I'll go through that. I was born in Lahore in Pakistan. My dad's from Pakistan. My mum's from Bangladesh. So there's a bit of political history between those two countries, which was, I think, problematic for my parents. So they made a decision to move abroad to Europe. They ended up in London and the story, the family myth goes, that the reason they didn't go to Frat Paris is that my dad had too many ex-girlfriends there and my mother wasn't having it So”
2022-01-21 · Intelligence Squared · The Pandemic on the Page, with Roopa Farooki · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“To remember it so that some future self, and I was thinking I was just writing for me, would look back and think, God, that was awful. To remember how terrible it had been. But actually at the same time to think that's why it won't happen again, to actually look back at it from a place of learning and think we got through it, we've reflected, we've learned, and we can move on. So I think that's why I thought it was perhaps worth sharing. But to be honest, I'm still kind of quite nervous about it sort of being out in the world for having, like I say, put myself in this, in centered in this book as well, knowing that it is a book actually written really for colleagues and for patients and for all of those who kind of, you know, like yourself who were on this journey. So thank you for saying that it was useful because that's actually all I really wanted it to be.”
2022-01-21 · Intelligence Squared · The Pandemic on the Page, with Roopa Farooki · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“When I kind of wrote it, I didn't think I was actually thinking of writing it for others to be honest. It was such a personal account. I started it off really for myself. And it was only towards the end of the writing when I began to wonder whether it would be helpful and whether it was something that perhaps might be shared or even should be shared. And you're always very nervous when you're writing something that is a little bit like memoir, which is such a personal story and also very worried about centering yourself in what is actually quite obviously a national tragedy. There are so many other bigger issues than my personal story. And it felt like a certain type of egotism to be putting yourself in the center. And obviously all memoirs centered. And that is its failing. But it was a way to try and share something and hold account, I think, or hold ourselves accountable to what was happening and to remember, as you very rightly say, our memories are parouse. And I didn't want to forget, actually, this terrible time. I wanted”
2022-01-21 · Intelligence Squared · The Pandemic on the Page, with Roopa Farooki · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT