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Tomás Ribero *, 30, a medical specialist in anesthesiology, critical medicine and intensive care, thinks about death every day. It is clear to him, like all his colleagues, that at some point on the road he is going to get sick, but his obligation is to be on the battlefront, putting his face to the Covid-19, using a kind of diving suit made of a mask, a filter respirator, overalls, gloves, and a face shield.
Even so, despite this certainty, he arrives at his workplace every day, changes and disinfects himself (an action he has to do several times a day) and begins his rounds in the Intensive Care Units (ICU) of a hospital in high complexity in the capital of the country.
Since this crisis broke, he has had 7 patients infected with coronavirus and not all of them have managed to get ahead. Thus, with death as an old acquaintance who arrives without warning and who is always accompanied by the place where he works, even in those sad and flooded days of losses, Tomás has not been embraced or comforted by anyone.
It has been almost two months since he saw his parents and he cannot stop thinking that if they get sick, he gives them Covid-19 or for some reason they end up hospitalized in an ICU, they will have to be alone and some colleague would have to give him a lousy news by phone and without any physical gesture of comfort, as he has had to give them in these days of quarantine. That is one thing you fear and you don’t want to ever have to experience.
But this is the war these soldiers are waging daily: in absolute solitude and isolation, even inside their homes. Because although they already have protocols and with each step of what they have to do to take care of themselves. The social isolation is there and you are not going to leave it for several more months. Among colleagues, friends and closest relatives, doctors like Tomás have come to the idea that they have hard, lonely months and even discrimination ahead.
The challenge of working in an ICU
Ribero always wanted to work in an ICU, that place of hospitals that all human beings fear and hope they will never have to visit, but that as a doctor represents a challenge because this is a place that puts them to the test. permanent.
To work in these units, you have to be fast, agile and the actions and decisions made by the doctors who work there, in a fraction of seconds and sometimes in the luxury of minutes, can mean life or death.
Accustomed to an inadvertent visitor who always leaves in the company of a patient, all the patients who reside there are literally risking their lives.
“In any part of medicine, doctors have, to some extent, the lives of patients in our hands, but when a person enters the ICU, there is a real and direct threat where his life really depends on you”, he said to THE NEW CENTURY Ribero, the specialist doctor who has been working in these units for five years.
Isolation at home
This week Tomás lost a patient with Covid-19. It was not an easy day and when he arrived at his house, in fact every night that he arrives at his house and leaves his clothes at the entrance to his home, he cannot kiss his wife or ask her for a comforting hug. She is also a doctor and throughout this month of quarantine they have had to keep their distance, even in the most difficult moments.
Still, she appreciates her luck, as she has no children, which apparently makes the isolation inside the homes of members of the health sector much more difficult to bear. “We have the ease that we are few people in the apartment, but I have friends, colleagues and work colleagues who have to leave their clothes at the entrance and have no contact with their children, which is even more difficult.”
But that is not the worst distance that this doctor has had to live, who remembers with joy the day that a patient with this virus that has put the world in checkmate, managed to overcome it.
But, effectively, that of his home is not the worst situation that this doctor has to face, who, during his first years of training, had to treat hundreds of wounded and mutilated people who ended up losing their lives unnecessarily, the product of an absurd war and meaningless as he refers to it. It is the distance that has been created with their patients, with people who are fighting alone and with whom it is increasingly difficult to show signs of humanity.
“We continued to care for our soldiers, our heroes (that’s how I see them), and we saw very often how these youngsters were putting their lives into absurd and meaningless conflict. That made us live very complex situations that the other type of health personnel did not have and that changes one and teaches them how to accompany patients. That is something that we cannot do today. We cannot approach them and they have had to give very bad news over the phone. ”
In fact, for Ribero, a case that marked his professional career was that of a very young soldier who came to the hospital with a very severe infection, a consequence of very dangerous bacteria. “I spent six hours with him doing all kinds of procedures but I couldn’t save him. I was with him the whole time. He died, but I was always with him, “he says.
Therefore, the most difficult thing he has had to face in these days of pandemic, has been seeing ICU patients in complete solitude, with a single 10-minute visit.
And as they struggle alone between the sound of the fans and a less bright light than the rest of the hospital, the doctors, wrapped in masks, glasses and masks, cannot hold their hands, look them straight in the eye with a compassionate look and tell them everything will be fine, even if that’s not necessarily true.
That is why the most difficult thing for Tomás has been having a patient who is losing the battle, next to another who is going to get ahead and having to transmit to each one of them his situation: he grimaces daily, thus Inside is crying to the patient who just lost.
“It is necessary to be able to express to each one of the families, with sincerity, from all kinds of languages (not only the verbal one), how is their relative and if it is not right, express it in a human and clear way. It is much easier to deliver this news in person, but now when we can talk to someone we have to have our faces covered, ”says Tomás, seconds before referring that he cannot imagine that situation when the news is delivered to him.
That is why he insisted that the challenge of working in an ICU is above all human. Doctors are not blank canvases: they are people who feel the loss, who want to avoid death, and who have to face patients and their families. And now, in the midst of this crisis, this is news that is happening in a distant and to some extent impersonal way, as the virus dictated.
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