OMG, yes. So, heartwarming Covid story alert! About week-whatever of lockdown we went into full PPE, and our water cooler, which lives in the middle of our unit was suddenly off-limits during shift, and inaccessible during breaks. 1/ https://twitter.com/mevparekh/status/1286434194223255556

I don't know how it happened, but maybe someone put a message out on social media, or someone had a friend of a friend who had a contact, but like 2 days later we had about 10 pallets of bottled water arrive. 2/

I'm not kidding, it just kept coming, we were falling over boxes of PPE looking for somewhere to stash this water. It was everywhere. You couldn't go into a room without having to squeeze past it. The handover room, the break room, the matron's office, the corridor. 3/

In the end, estates came and installed another water cooler in the corridor, and then we started shipping that bottled water out around the hospital. 4/

In normal times I'm against bottle water on principle - in the UK we're blessed with clean water from the taps, no need to wrap it in plastic on the way to your mouth. 5/

But that gift of bottled water kept us going through the hot, sweaty early days of full PPE, and I'm sorry I can't remember who donated it now. 6/

Remember panic buying? Those crazy early days? No bread on the shelves, special shopping slots to let NHS workers in first? Around that time, crates of bread turned up in the break room. Hovis wholemeal, help yourselves they said. So we did. 7/

It was April and the temperature was more like July. Wall to wall sunshine and the aircon rumbling under the pressure to keep the unit under 27 degrees. Boxes of iced coffee turned up from Costa... 8/

... ice creams bought by a colleague in Tescos where they let us have more than the designated 1 item per person (40 ice creams for the nurses and medics and cleaners and housekeepers and ward clarks and physios and pharmacists and surgeons and everyone on shift that day)... 9/

Boxes of hand cream samples from the hospital pharmacy, cakes baked by colleagues families, cookies and chocolates and baskets of fruit. We're always lucky with gifts like this, and they always lift our spirits, never more so than now. 10/

And then came the scrubs, bags and bags of colourful, jazzy, happy scrubs. We pulled them out and rubbed the fabric between our fingers and thought about the people who were thinking about us as they sewed. 11/

We had no idea who they were, and they didn't know us, but somehow this gift connected us. Just like the knitted face mask extenders with 'made with love' printed on the buttons, and the cotton headbands and the donated face shields. 12/

The idea that people out there were taking time to do something like this for us, for people they didn't know, meant more to us than any clap ever could, and infinitely more than empty words from a distant politician. 13/

I guess what I'm saying is, thank you. To everyone who baked and sewed and donated and lent their support and sent good thoughts and virtual hugs and walked alongside us. We heard you, and it helped, it made a difference. 14/