Pain still raw for family almost one year after hero Walsall nurse's death
The sister of nurse Areema Nasreen has described her as an ongoing inspiration almost a year after her death.
Kazeema Afzal marked the one-year anniversary of lockdown by revealing how her final words were now shaping her life.
Areema was one of the first NHS workers to die in the pandemic.
The 36-year-old worked on the Acute Medical Unit at Walsall Manor Hospital, where sister Kazeema, 33, still works.
Kazeema revealed that her sister passed a final message via a colleague as she was taken into intensive care.
“She said, ‘my sister... make sure she works hard. I want her to follow in my footsteps’,” Kazeema said. “That was the last thing she said.”
March 23 is one year to the day since Boris Johnson announced the first national lockdown.
Since then almost 7,500 patients have died in hospitals across the Black Country, Birmingham and Staffordshire. Almost one in 10 of these patients have died at Walsall Manor, with betwen 700 and 800 Covid patients dying at each of the major hospitals in Dudley, Wolverhampton and Walsall. Meanwhile more than 108,000 cases of coronavirus have been confirmed in the Black Country, along with more than 78,000 in Staffordshire and just under 100,000 in Birmingham.
The death of Areema shocked the nation because of her young age and also put into focus the risks healthcare workers were taking to save lives in the early part of the pandemic.
Kazeema works on the same unit as her sister as a healthcare assistant and is undertaking an apprenticeship to become a nurse. She says she is determined to forge a career as it would have made Areema proud.
Areema, a mother-of-three, died on April 3 after spending weeks in intensive care.
Kazeema, from Walsall, said: “She was a hero. She was not well on the first few days of her final shift. I had been telling her to go home and she said ‘no, they need me’.
“She was a true hero and that is why we call her hero because she could have easily gone home. I kept checking her temperature on the ward and it was going high. I was telling her to go home and she said ‘no, we will finish the shift together’. We never thought it would be Covid, we never even imagined it. She had a backache and the symptoms she had were not related to Covid.”
Kazeema, Areema and their other sister Ash, 32, all started working at the hospital at the same time, 16 years ago. They had worked on the same ward for just a few weeks when tragedy struck.
Areema was the first person in their family to go to university, where she studied nursing.
That has inspired Kazeema to begin her apprenticeship in nursing, which she starts next week.
She added: “It is still so raw, we are still not come to terms with it really happened.
“It is heartbreaking every single day. That is why I went back to work straight away. At home it was hard during lockdown. I thought I would keep moving and doing a job that she loved and I love.
"I work on the same ward as her. I am a healthcare assistant. I am doing my apprenticeship for nursing, I start this week. I work on the same ward that Areema worked. I had worked only a few weeks with her when we sadly lost her.”
Areema started working at the hospital as a housekeeper in 2003 and 16 years later fulfilled her dream by qualifying as a nurse at Walsall Manor Hospital.
The hospital has since launched a scholarship in her memory, fully funding a degree in nursing for someone who dreams of a career in healthcare but cannot afford the fees.
