Two floors in PGIMER building separate them, but this nursing couple won’t be able to see each other for days

They’ll be separated for a long time as Dhillon, aged 31, works in a high-risk zone where patients with flu-like symptoms tested for Covid-19 are handed their reports

Two floors in a building separate this couple at the Post Graduate Institute of Medical Education and Research (PGIMER), both have been assigned night shifts, but nursing officers Gurbinder Singh Dhillon and Kuldeep Kour last set eyes on each other five days back.

They’ll be separated for a long time as Dhillon, aged 31, works in a high-risk zone where patients with flu-like symptoms tested for Covid-19 are handed their reports. Staffers over here have to be isolated once their weekly shifts are over. In Dhillon’s case, it will be next week, after which he will be quarantined up to May 13.

As of now, he lives in a temporary accommodation in a hotel and works in the hospital from 8 pm to 2 pm, while Kaur, aged 29, returns to their Sector 38 home. She works in PGIMER’s emergency operation theatre, considered to be a moderate-risk area even though chances of contracting the infection in hospital settings are high.

“Yes, it is frustrating, but one rejoices in knowing that you are doing what society requires in this pandemic. There is a cost to pay, however, because one has to live apart from the family,” she says.

Once the infection spread to India, the couple decided to move Dhillon’s parents, both nearly 70, with Kour driving them nearly 450km to drop them at their village, Nangal, in Faridkot, and returning to Chandigarh.

“Given their age which brackets them in the high-risk group and before I started dealing directly with Covid-19 suspected cases I moved them and my daughter to our ancestral village to minimise infection risk,” Dhillon adds.

In the three years that she has been married, Kour says the family have never been separated for so long from each other.

Work helps. “Once I am with my patients I forget everything and just focus on them, but when I go home it’s distressing to live alone, and have no one to speak to. To tell them how you feel working in these conditions,” she says.