It’s 2021… Almost 2 years after the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic started. Through these years our lives changed drastically. Everything, from supermarket trips to getting coffee and getting to work, changed completely to adapt to the new reality and create a safer way of living for the conditions of a pandemic.
All of us struggled one way or the other, even those who didn’t think that the covid threat is real. This pandemic completely changed our routines and our lives. But how is it to be a student midwife during such times? How did it feel to enter the healthcare field as a newbie, during a healthcare crisis? Those, and many more, will be analyzed in this article about the life of a student midwife during the covid years.
Disclaimer: Midwifery is a very inclusive and safe space for everyone, where your identity and your needs are valid and important to us. Thus, the terms used in this article aim towards making everyone feel comfortable and included.
[if you feel that you are not included at any point, please contact us and help us change that]
© NIKOLETA CHATZIPANAGIOTIDOU, SOME RIGHTS RESERVED 12/08/2021
The Start
Covid hit my country when I was in my second trimester of Midwifery. I had just gotten through my first ever university exams and I was thrilled to start enjoying my life as a university student. However, the universe had different plans for me and for every other person at that point… Around March the pandemic became officially a global problem and the Minister of Health decided to close the universities, as the gathering of the students would make the whole situation even worse since the transmission of the virus was so easy to occur.
By that point, we were over the moon! Vacation time for all of us! We were packing our suitcases like crazy and booking our flights home manically, thrilled by that opportunity that happened out of the blue to see our friends and family back home. The instructions we were given clearly and stated that all universities would be closed for 2 weeks only and then we would officially start the second trimester as usual.
If only that had been the case…The 2 weeks passed and the situation was only getting worse. Not only didn’t the universities open, everything else closed as well. No transportation, no stores, supermarket trips only for the necessities … Things were getting serious. Around that time a new rule was applied by the government; we were not allowed to exits our houses except for some very specific reasons (supermarket, pharmacy, walking our pets, hospital, etc). And it was around that time that it hit us. Our lives would be changed for a very very long time.
The problems began
The two weeks quickly became a month and the month became two and so on. The initial happiness and carefree feeling quickly got replaced by worry, anger, stress and feeling unsure about everything.
It was at the end of April when things started getting hard for us as students. University classes were 100% taught online by that point and all the classes that taught us clinical skills were now done through a computer. Naturally, that caused a lot of reactions and was the root of many concerns referring to our skills and the experience we were missing out on, because there was no intention of completing those classes in person again when the pandemic would be over. The anxiety was rising and everything was unpredictable. The inevitable stress was also causing a lot of misunderstandings and many heated conversations due to the fact that everything was new for everyone and we were all just trying to get a grip on the new reality as quickly as possible.
Online school was a challenge if we are being honest. Suddenly, we got deprived form face-to-face lessons and many students struggled with switching to an all-online way of learning. That happened for one of the two reasons; either they were not able to have a laptop or a stable WiFi line in order to attend the classes or they couldn’t follow up with the new way of learning. From my personal experience, note-taking became a lot harder and asking questions to the professors also was challenging because they couldn’t see us in a classroom and that was a struggle. In addition, the class hours were cut short, putting a lot more pressure on both the professors and us to complete the learning material in fewer hours.
The bright side
Despite all the problems and the bumps along the way, not everything had a bad outcome. Through the chaos of the pandemic, my class got so much closer. People who would have never talked to each other in person started chatting and sharing memories through the shared problems of online learning. Friendships only grew stronger with the distance and the dreams for the covid-free era got so much bigger.
Moreover, one of the greatest successes of this period in life for me personally, was the creation of this blog. Midwife Evi K. and I decided to bring into life this vision of us despite the troubling times we were all going through, in order to bring light into our lives and use this time that we had into creating something beautiful.
I believe that most of us can agree that, even though the start was really difficult, somewhere along the way we all had a talk with ourselves. We sat down and really talked with ourselves. We set new goals, evaluated the already existed ones and make a plan of action in order to be a better version of us by the time that Covid would end. That endoscopy is very much needed and it really saddens me that we are not able to find time to do that in our everyday life and that we had to have a global pandemic in order to find that window in our program to just sit with ourselves and really listen to what we need.
Conclusion
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Co-Founder and Co-Writer
The “Being a Midwife” team
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