[ad_1]
I had never been out of Turin for so long. Except for a passage of a few hours, he had not come since last December. The epidemic alienates people, but it also alienates us from the places that belong to us. If in the first wave Covid had remained at a degree of separation from my acquaintances here, as on the threshold, since the beginning of October it tightened around my absence: two patients, then ten, twenty, until I lost count. When I learned that the Maria Vittoria, the hospital where my father worked for twenty-eight years and which has for me the familiarity of certain places from childhood, was full and in trouble, I decided to see again. Because the news I received was not reconciled with the skepticism that now spreads everywhere, with the doubt tinged with impatience that the situation in the hospitals was not so serious, certainly not like in March, that we were already improving and ready to go. leave.
So much It is worth clarifying immediately then: in Maria Vittoria I have not seen queues of ambulances, I have not seen jammed beds or nurses running frantically through the corridors. The hospital is accessible without hindrance and the open space between the wards looks just as I remembered, with just the addition of a military tent and staff in white overalls. Oh sure, the quiet courtyard! Luca commented when I pointed it out to him. Luca, an anesthetist who also had the disease between the first and second waves, like seventy other operators. We’re on the third floor, the windows wide open, wet bleach stains on the floors. There were operating rooms here, but they have been converted into intensive care rooms, all but one, for emergencies. A closed circuit camera system was installed and from the monitor I see the most severe Covid patients sedated, intubated, many tracheostomized.
Behind the perception that is common to us from the outside whether the hospitals are at 30%, 50% or close to saturation, there is the much simpler truth that here the beds are always full, they are in normal condition, much less now. A few days ago, in the middle of the night, a 62-year-old Covid patient with severe respiratory failure arrived. She was intubated in the emergency room, but there were no more beds in the ICU and there were none in the rest of the city. The crisis unit told them to take him to Domodossola, more than two hours away. Luca didn’t feel it, because an unstable patient runs the risk of dying in such a long transfer. Decided to overbook. The nurses on duty swapped three patients to create additional space. In the morning, because of stress, they all fought against everyone. The incessant combining and recombination of the beds absorbs a lot of energy, in all departments. With the volumes it reaches, Covid is also a cold problem of distribution of bodies: bodies that breathe on their own, that breathe badly or very badly, that no longer breathe.
Hospitals like Maria Vittoria, already suffocated normally, they were forced to an unprecedented logistical effort. We from the outside say to increase intensive care, but we are not aware of the cascade of complications that such a command brings with it. Here it was a question of moving entire apartments, often more than once, rigorously dividing each path between dirty and clean, mounting partitions, changing the pressure of the rooms, and bringing oxygen wherever possible. And here it means everywhere in Italy, because this hospital is all hospitals. Even on the second floor, in obstetrics and gynecology, where my father was, the geography changed. It was modified to accommodate the additional influx of patients from another hospital’s counterpart ward, intended exclusively for Covid, and to create an isolated sector in which to house positive pregnant women, who are also monitored by new cameras.
One passes now down the hall, with his little escort: in front of a guard who makes everyone move away, behind a cleaner who sanitizes the road. Visits, as well as the sending of flowers and any gifts, are obviously prohibited in the red obstetrics area. Covid changes the birth procedure, and the excluded parents and grandparents often do not understand, they do not accept, they rebel. Biagio, whom I remember as a young man and who became primary in the meantime, repeats several times that they guarantee everything they can guarantee in an emotionally fragile moment such as childbirth. But except for parties and emergencies, everything stopped. Outside there are women with uterine prolapses, women with fibroids pressing on the bladder, women ready for a hysteroscopy, but they will have to wait until a later date, because Covid demands all the attention. In fact, in the emergency room database, on the ground floor, Covid has a black dot next to it, and almost everyone has it: codes red, yellow and green.
Enrico, who took over as primary school a little earlier of the pandemic, he tells me that this morning he saw thirteen and sent home only one. It seems like he hasn’t had much rest lately and he’s eating poorly. It’s after three in the afternoon, just outside the red area and I take him to buy a sandwich at a bar on via Cibrario. Also ask for a one and a half liter bottle of water. I always do now, he adds almost incidentally. In spring he had a retinal detachment due to dehydration. When you’re in the red zone, you can’t drink, you can’t urinate, you can’t scratch your neck, and you forget anyway. While eating fast he shows me the tacs on his phone. The lungs are divided into 24 sectors and how many are compromised by the infection are counted: 7 out of 24, 12 out of 24, 16 out of 24. A few days ago a lady arrived at the emergency room with a saturation of just over 50%. Practically drowned. I ask him how he could resist at home until then and he gives me a half smile, without answering. But since it does not say: in the houses, sheltered from the gaze and often also from the official counts, perhaps the most shameful chapter of the epidemic is unfolding. Enrico enlarges the lung on two-finger CT: Do you see the white spots? It looks bombarded.
Personnel operating in the red area must remain there.in theory, for a maximum number of minutes, such as when exposed to a radioactive source. In practice, they stay there as long as necessary, hours and hours and hours. When I stop in front of the dirty emergency room, I have the impression of feeling that radioactive charge, a very particular pressure. The door opens for a moment and, no, nothing normal there: beds in the corridor, personnel in diving suits and cylinders everywhere, as if the whole of Turin were without oxygen at any moment. Further down, underground, are the morgues. Silvana and another girl, younger and with drawn eyebrows, are taking care of the bodies, I don’t hear her name. When a Covid patient dies in the ward, they are wrapped in a sheet, the sheet is sprayed with disinfectant, and while placed in the coffin, the coffin is closed and taken out of the hospital.
Covid changes birth procedures, but he atrociously changed the killing procedures. The typical story is that of a person who was picked up by an ambulance from his home and was then never seen or touched by a family member, not even as a body. We usually dress them, comb them, shave the men and make up the women, says Silvana. With them we can do nothing. He has a shameless familiarity with death, but desolate when he talks about it. He decided, on his own initiative, to put at least the folded clothes of the deceased in the coffin, on top of the bleach-soaked sheet, a timid gesture of courtesy. Meanwhile, he shows me the cold room full, the dressing room full of coffins, two more rooms, and the chapel, all full of coffins. The hospital has a cell with six seats, but the new daily average of sixteen to seventeen corpses. The Covid surplus is not a simple subtraction: more, because many ordinary deaths now occur outside the hospital. Funeral homes are struggling to keep up, some cemeteries too, the whole mechanism of death involved. And yet, on the surface, the truly peaceful courtyard.
In recent weeks, several people have withdrawn mobile phones to film this calm, witnesses in their own way to the falsehoods about the epidemic that television is distributing to us. And perhaps the real problem in what television has given us about hospitals, not in the months of the pandemic for: in all the previous years. A narrative distortion, in which staff must always run, fret, in which beds pile up in hallways and every rescue takes place on the edge. When we are told that health collapses we think about this and pretend that reality looks like us, but why should it? Being able to treat everything and everyone, at best and independently: this is the meaning of a hospital, or at least the meaning we attribute to it here. If true, I’ve seen him collapse licking a hospital. And a hospital that, today, all hospitals in Italy, with a staff than all staff. That is why I have chosen to call you only by name. Arriving this morning, I caught a glimpse of a local newspaper headline: Improving the data. Glimpses of Piedmont in the Orange Zone. Every day we beat more as Christmas approaches, like when the landing plane has not yet stopped and the nervous twitch of the seat belts is heard. Some doctors and nurses here have already had psychological crises.
the Messenger Service created a newsletter on the coronavirus. free: sign up here.
All the staff are at serious risk of exhaustion, and if the pizza towers came for them on the nights of the first wave, now only other sick people and some protests arrive. However, none of the people I spoke to actually complained about this, even accepting the March rhetoric and its predictable October betrayal. N complained of excessive and prolonged work. What they are unanimously undergoing, from intensive care to obstetrics to morgues, is having to communicate so much suffering to so many people every day. Tell the father that he cannot get close to his wife and child; Video call instead of intubated patients, then call again to say the patient is aggravated, has passed away, and no, they won’t be able to see him even now. Covid has carried out inhuman practices that custom mitigated and we, from the outside, have delegated the part of inhumanity to the same people on whom everything else already weighed. How can we ask them again? In the coming weeks, as each of you look for your own sparkles, we would do well to take this into account.
November 20, 2020 (change November 21, 2020 | 08:26)
© REPRODUCTION RESERVED
[ad_2]
