Coronavirus Australia pop-up test clinic: ‘I’ve never been so happy to have my brain scraped’

A nurse speaks to a person outside a testing facility at St Vincents Hospital in Sydney. Picture: John Feder

The first thing you get when you walk into a COVID-19 pop-up testing clinic is a face mask.

The last thing you get is a swab that extends so far back into your nasal cavity it feels like your brain is being scraped.

What happens in between will restore your faith in the medical system, particularly the nurses, doctors and specialists whose unlimited courage has placed them at the forefront of the worst pandemic the world has seen in more than a century.

Last Wednesday, I got a cold. It was nothing serious. A sore throat, a headache, a weight on my chest that felt like the beginning of a cough.

I figured I was rundown but, since I was due to see my kids, I thought I’d better check in and make sure I was all right.

I called a mate who’s a doctor. “Get it done,’’ he said. “You’ve got two of the three symptoms, plus you’re recently back from overseas. Some GPs are swabbing patients in the carpark. It’s easy.’’

Pictured is a doctor conducts drive up COVID-19 tests at Maroubra in Sydney. Picture: Richard Dobson

It wasn’t. But the practice nurse at my GP’s office did direct me to one of several pop-up coronavirus clinics now studding Sydney. One was in Redfern, in the inner west, just a few minutes from where I live. A clinician greeted me at the door.

Dressed in a surgical apron, a surgical mask and shiny latex gloves, she was hard to miss. She gave me a mask, some forms and directed me to a bench behind a surgical screen.

Within a few minutes I was ushered further into the building to two more staff. There were more forms, more questions and then I was taken into the main waiting area. That was when things got odd.

A dozen chairs had been placed in the room, all facing forward, all spaced about 2.5m apart in perfect symmetry. It felt like a 12-step meeting for obsessive-compulsive types who knew they had a problem but weren’t quite ready to take it on.

Two clinicians sat at a trestle table at the head of the room, their age, description — even gender — difficult to determine beneath all their protective outerwear.

One other patient waited with me. When he left, one of the staff came over to his seat and sprayed it with disinfectant. No one spoke.

Were it not for the unfailing decency of the staff, you’d swear you were in an episode of Black Mirror or the Twilight Zone.

When my turn came, I was told a swab would be taken from my throat and my nose. The throat was easy, but the nasal swab requires a long, skewer-like device to be threaded all the way back into your nasal cavity. It left me with watering eyes and a fresh appreciation of the depth of the human head.

I was told to self-isolate and given a stack of literature and a web portal address that allows you to check your results. The whole thing took 30 minutes.

My results came back a day later: negative. I picked up the kids that afternoon. Definitely worth the brain scrape.