When you are caring for people you don’t feel any fear

natalia sáez Nurse Sanitas Hospital La Moraleja

The operating room stopped functioning and within a week we had converted it into an intensive care unit and from then on we hadintensive care nurses. The work was completely different. We had to change the way we worked and learn to move about in all that protective clothing that slowed us down. At the beginning, they said it was older people who were more affected, but then patients of my age started to come in and that made us really worried. We felt really sorry for them, because young people were coming in who had children, and they were really unwell. We were used to seeing patients for one or two hours at a time. We were spending eight hours a day with these patients. It was strange how aggressive the virus was. It would come in quietly and within a few days the person was really ill and didn’t seem to recover. They would be ill for weeks and not get better. We had never seen that before. I told my family that although I had never been in a war, I could imagine that this was a bit like nursing in a war zone. When you left your house you would get to the hospital and think: My God, I am scared to go in! But once you went in you would forget your fear. When you are looking after people you are not afraid, you are just giving your best. Then you would come out of there and start to think again about how you could pass it to those who were waiting for

you at home.

Recently, in April, we started to get some control of the situation. From then, we started to see people getting better. I think it was a short time before Easter, around 7 or 8 April, when we managed to get the tubes off the first patient we had in the icu, which was a really great moment, seeing people getting better, leaving, gave the whole team a lot of hope. I usually worked the morning shift, but then there were no set times, you could work morning, night or afternoon, depending on what was needed. Sometimes we worked back to back shifts. Now, the hospital is no longer overwhelmed. Now we are doing more pcr tests and we find there are people who are infected who we wouldn’t have been tested before. It’s not like it was in March. Now the people coming in are not so critically ill. But it could happen that within a month we end up like we were at the end of March, which would be awful.

We managed to take the tubes off the first patient we had in icu, and that has been a great moment.

I remember a patient only a couple of years older than me who had to have a tracheotomy. When he woke up he couldn’t speak. He was upset with everyone and we couldn’t understand him and tried to tell him: Don’t worry, you’re awake, everything’s fine. We couldn’t understand why he was so upset, and we gave him a board and he wrote on it for us. He was upset because he didn’t know anything about his family and thought his wife and children had died of Covid. That was the most touching moment for me. It still gives me goosebumps. He knew his telephone number by heart and wrote it down and we rang his wife and his children, aged 15 and 16 years old. They all cried. He asked them about his parents and they were well too. He was the only one in the family who got really sick. Later, when he recovered, he sent us a lovely card and some sweets. Personally, the best thing was the teamwork and the support from colleagues. Sometimes you get on better with one or another, but now we are all so united that we have worked together really well. This was a very different time, one that we will never experience again. We all go back to our own lives and routines and forget the moment. I don’t know how we did it, I really don’t. I hope they develop a vaccine and are able to vaccinate the majority of the population, but I don’t think that’s the whole answer. I imagine this will go on for a while, perhaps one or two years. Now I am worried about the children going back to school in a fortnight, perhaps not so much for the younger ones, but for the older ones. I think the measures they are putting in are good and I think the children need to be with their peers again. My daughter of 10 years old wants to go back, but the little one, who is 5, likes being at home with us. My husband has been remote working and has looked after everything – the house, the children, everything. The hospital gave us MADRID — SPAIN the chance to stay for free in apartments that they rented for us. But my husband preferred me to be with them, and I felt the same. We have taken a small break, in a little village in Ávila, where my parents are from, very close to Madrid. I have been a nurse for twenty-two years and I think I am going to go back to it with more enthusiasm than ever. �