When we create some story out of our mind's eye or narrate our own experience in the form of a book, our intention is to provide a unique taste of storytelling to the readers. Although my first book Five Minutes was purely fictional, I didn't face much difference in writing this non-fiction book which is purely based on incidents that I witnessed during the first wave of the COVID pandemic. Writing a book out of imagination or out of own experience is quite similar, although one is visualised with closed eyes and the other with eyes open.
Even though I believe that the supreme God provides me the passion to think and write, but, there are so many individuals in our lives who actually encourage and support us in this mission.
I always owe everything that I have achieved to my parents and my family members. So I must thank all of them from the bottom of my heart.
In particular, my marked appreciation is to my wife Dr. Subarna Mitra and my son Bhavin Nayak, the two pillars of my strength and motivation, who are actually the reason for the narration in this book to much extent.
The description of this book is based on my experiences, while I was working as a senior clinical faculty in an institute of national importance (INI) i.e., AIIMS, Raipur during the first wave of COVID-19 pandemic. Actually the book consists of a stepwise description about the balance of my personal and professional life during this extraordinary situation.
I had experienced the first wave of COVID-19 pandemic in a unique way which encouraged me to pen it down, with myself as the main character of the book.
The narration in the book begins with my travel to Mumbai towards the last part of January 2019, when there were no cases of COVID-19 infection in India. While on board, I was going through a news article which described the unprecedented impact of the corona virus in Wuhan and its subsequent spread to European countries. It reflected as a bad dream while I was taking a short nap mid-air, and alerted me about something scary is coming to engulf us.
In the first few chapters, I have described about my usual life style during pre-COVID and early-COVID time. As a part of my normal living, I was travelling to different places, having parties and fun with friends, going for outings with my wife and child, doing the day-to-day work in my hospital etc, but slowly, all this unlimited freedom in my life, merged with the gradual increase of restrictions due to detection of more and more cases of COVID-19.
Finally, the day arrived, when the country was declared to go under a complete lockdown. Because of this, I couldn't visit to my family who were staying in a distant city in another state, due to the job held there by my wife. So too with our baby sitter cum domestic help, who got stranded at her home town and couldn't return. I got stressed thinking about the problems faced by my doctor wife in my absence, since she was also working in another INI and it became more intense since my child was insisting upon my presence.
At the same time, the work pattern in our medical college and hospital changed drastically since my hospital became the first COVID hospital of the state, necessitating our avid participation in the treatment of the COVID patients in the front line.
A chronological description, about how a referral tertiary care hospital took its shape into a full-phased, high turn-over COVID hospital has been cited in it.
On one hand, I was living alone in a flat and was doing all my household work without the assistance of maids; on the other hand, there was no scope of meeting any friends or colleagues since everyone was following social distancing.
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