Our ICU looks different now.

We still have 16 beds. We still have our nurses, our doctors, our pharmacist and our physios. We still have our patients, some of whom are awake and able to talk to us, most of whom are connected to ventilators and able to communicate only though nods and blinks, but some too sedated to be able to communicate at all.

But the Sars-CoV-2 pandemic has changed our ICU almost completely. We are all wearing "enhanced PPE" – FFP-3 masks, visors, hats, full-length gowns and gloves. Entry and exit to the unit is strictly monitored to make sure all entering and leaving "don" and "doff" their PPE correctly.

There are thick sheets of green-blue plastic at each entry and exit point, which need to be zipped and unzipped to let you in or out – we have nicknamed the clinical area within these barriers "the bubble" to make it sound less austere an environment than it is.

There are no families in the ICU now. Our ICU has completely open visiting hours and so whatever time of day or night you could see family members beside the beds of their loved ones, holding their hands, talking to them and to the bedside nurses – but now there are none. For now, families must receive updates on their critically ill loved ones by phone.

It has been barely six weeks since we held our first planning meeting on how we would change our ICU to deal with the predicted volume of patients with severe respiratory failure. In my professional life I have been involved in planning for several potential epidemics – Mers-CoV, Ebola – but we were fortunate not to have to call any of our plans into action. This time, the pandemic did reach us.

In the two-week period between our first planning meeting and the admission of our first patient, we had to design new rotas for all tiers of medical staff, make plans to expand our critical care capacity several-fold, and upskill our anaesthetic, theatre nursing and medical colleagues in looking after critically ill patients. They did not ask for this – they did not choose to work in critical care. But this is what they now have to do, and they have faced the challenge with enthusiasm and with good humour. It cannot be easy, working in an unfamiliar role in such circumstances.

The PPE is so important. We know this and we are fortunate in having lots of it. But it is hot. It is difficulty to hear and be heard. Three weeks in and people have established pressure areas on the bridge of their nose. Communicating with patients is technically challenging and not being able to show your face, your facial expressions, to your patients feels like a real barrier to good communication.

Communication with family is very different to normal. We pride ourselves on maintaining close communication with families, meeting regularly, building trust and rapport. It is much harder to do this over the phone. Families understand why they cannot visit, but we are all aware of how cruel this virus can be, separating families at such a time.

When this is all over, we can go back to having families in the ICU. Patients will able to see our faces as we talk to them. We won’t worry about bringing this virus home to our families. We will be able to walk in and out of the unit with just a squirt of gel on our hands.

We will remember how colleagues from all over the hospital came and offered help. We will remember how families took time to thank us for the work we were doing even amongst their own anguish and fear.

We will remember how we, as a team, supported each other though this extraordinary time. Our ICU looks different now, but sometime soon this will become a memory of how our ICU looked – then.

Dr Rosie Baruah is a consultant in critical care and anaesthetics at the Western General in Edinburgh