We celebrated the recovery of each patient

beatriz estéfani Nurse Sanitas Hospital La Zarzuela

MADRID — SPAIN

I was off for a few days and when I came back I found the intensive care unit practically 100% full, with all the patients lying face down and gravely ill.

The first day, I literally thought I was going to die. What shall we do? I doubted, I wondered what to do in such a mess. I didn’t study nursing to be in a war like this. It seemed much like biological warfare, after all. Sometimes I wondered if my colleagues had gone mad. How could they be so calm and smiling, talking about other things. But that was just on the first day. I felt a bit better on the second. Then I realised that if you used the protection, nothing was going to happen to you.

After a while, I started to think that if you got sick it was because you weren’t protecting yourself properly and that I wasn’t going to get sick. I didn’t, but I don’t know if that was coincidence.

It was hard to see patients of under the age of 50 years old, with no underlying illnesses and with a poor prognosis. I especially remember two of them. One survived, the other didn’t. Sometimes they left letters in the cubicles. If you read them you would feel really sad. You were sad because their families didn’t even get to see them or keep their personal objects, because everything taken to the crematorium.

So, when we had patients who came out of intensive care, we would put their favourite songs on high volume. Some of them chose something from Nirvana, Metallica, and nearly all of them were a bit into heavy rock. We would clap for them, record them and send it to their family. Because every patient that recovered was a victory for us.

I know that now the pandemic is back to the same level as it was in March. There are new cases every day. I look forward to working hard again with the team, but the most difficult thing will be the isolation. Some people at least had chalets, older children, and could sort something out. But I live in an apartment with a little boy of aged 3 years old. The isolation is what really gets me, more than working with Covid patients.�