Rachel Clarke was a specialist palliative care doctor, working in Oxford, when the pandemic hit and she was redeployed. “People think the pandemic happened in intensive care. The vast majority of people who died never went near intensive care,” she says. “They were too frail and too sick to cope with the treatment of a ventilator.”
I’ve been talking to Clarke for a while about numerous things – the death of her father from cancer, the second Congo war, why the NHS, social care and a lot else besides are bust because of direct policy decisions – and she always maintains the same demeanour: acute but very gentle, compassionate but self-possessed, her face open and unruffled; even her hair smells like everything’s going to be OK. But when we get to the subject of Covid, she says she is worried she’s going to start crying. I say, don’t sweat it, I nearly started crying 10 minutes ago (dads, cancer). But she’s a palliative care doctor: it takes a hell of a lot to make her cry.
