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In a hospital Guayaquil, in Ecuador, the dead of the pandemic even piled up in the bathrooms. Some were shrouded by nurses because “the morgue staff did not stock up,” reveals one of the health workers.
The man, who agreed to speak by phone with the AFP under reservation for fear of being fired, shares the “nightmare” that he lived within the saturated health system of Guayaquil, one of the main sources of spread of the new coronavirus in Latin America.
What he witnessed, he says, is “traumatic” and broke his life inside and outside his work.
When the emergency began in March, she recalls, each nurse went from treating 15 to 30 patients in a 24-hour shift. “So many people came that when you were going to channel them (with serum) they practically died on your hands”.
So “they were discharging or referring patients (to other centers) to free all those beds. We have 65 intensive care unit beds occupied with covid patients. Anesthesia machines were removed from operating rooms to be supplied with respirators. “
“The (sick) people are alone, sad, the medication wreaks havoc on the gastrointestinal tract, some defecate; they feel bad and they think that they will always be like this and they see that the person next to them begins to drown and shout that they need oxygen ”.
The deaths multiplied in an instant, according to the official. “The morgue staff did not stock up and what we have had to do many times is to shroud the bodies and accumulate them in the bathrooms.”
His colleagues, he adds, have “had to put up with the urge” to use the toilets occupied “by corpses.”
Only when “six or seven are stacked, they come to collect them,” says this 35-year-old nurse, three on duty at one of the hospital centers facing the pandemic in Ecuador, where there are officially 22,700 infected, including 576 dead since on February 29, the vast majority in Guayaquil.
Everyone has fled
But the official count is one step behind the tragedy. In the first 15 days of April, deaths tripled with respect to the monthly average and reached 6,700 in the province of Guayas and its capital, Guayaquil.
This list includes the victims and suspected cases of the new coronavirus, as well as those of other diseases.
The President of Ecuador, Lenin Moreno, has recognized that “records fall short”. A feeling that is reinforced by what the nurse described.
According to what he says, after the morgues overflowed, refrigerated containers entered the hospital to deposit the bodies, some of them spent up to ten days “wrapped in covers that are like a black travel suitcase.”
Some relatives “break the cover (…), then the fluids come out. This is a health disaster, “he says.
In the midst of the emergency, “everyone has fled. The administrative staff has been put under cover. The psychologists who should be working have fled (…), the 32 dentists who should be helping (…) to make the records ”.
The nurse hardly feels the consolation of seeing the death toll drop last week. But torments accompany him on his return home. “What you think about the most is getting sick and the awareness that (…) you have also been able to make patients sick.”
Without consolation
When he returns home, after 24 hours of service, with pain in his feet, he tries to rest but then he is suddenly awakened by the “nightmare”: he runs until he falls and “opens the bathroom door with the number of corpses”, “you will not you can go back to sleep ”, he admits.
His family life was also disrupted. He can no longer share with his parents and brother and now follows a strict self-isolation that begins with the ritual of disinfecting the car and his shoes. It is followed by a shower in the patio of the house and washing clothes in hot water.
“Like on a plastic table apart from everyone. I go out of my room with a mask, I can’t hug anyone, not even pets. ” Every now and then think about the footprint that the pandemic is leaving you.
It “marks the fact of not being able to collaborate beyond putting a cannula knowing that (the patient) needs a ventilator and you have no other choice” when it comes to the elderly with diabetes or hypertension.
“They tell you: well, put the oxygen and the slow serum on it and leave it there. What if it was my mom? What if it was my dad? That kills you, it kills you psychologically ”.
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