“We were overwhelmed and didn’t even have enough material”

“We know al­most noth­ing about this dis­ease. The makeshift beds in the ICU were fill­ing up and we were short of as­sisted breath­ing ap­pa­ra­tus. We were run­ning out of med­ica­tion and had to im­pro­vise new for­mu­las, mak­ing mix­tures pro­posed by the anes­thetists. I’d never ex­pe­ri­enced a sit­u­a­tion like it. The more vet­eran nurses also told us that what we were ex­pe­ri­enc­ing was not com­pa­ra­ble to any pre­vi­ous sit­u­a­tion. No more peo­ple could fit in the morgue. The bags of be­long­ings of the dead were piled up be­cause no one could come and re­trieve them. At home, you slept ex­hausted, not be­cause it was easy to dis­con­nect from the day-to-day life of the hos­pi­tal.”

These are the words of Mer­itx­ell Riba, a 37-year-old nurse who joined the In­ten­sive Care Unit of the Sagrat Cor Uni­ver­sity Hos­pi­tal in March to re­in­force the ser­vice. She pre­vi­ously worked in an aes­thetic sur­gi­cal prac­tice based in the same hos­pi­tal build­ing. When the pan­demic broke out, she of­fered to join the hos­pi­tal’s med­ical staff. An ex­treme, un­prece­dented sit­u­a­tion was fore­seen, but the full grav­ity had not yet been ap­pre­ci­ated. “I signed a one-and-a-half month con­tract be­cause it was very dif­fi­cult to imag­ine what was com­ing our way,” she re­calls. Far from giv­ing up this work, she has since de­cided to con­tinue fight­ing on the front­line against the virus.

“The worst time was the first phase,” she re­calls, “be­cause we were over­whelmed every­where, and we didn’t even have enough ma­te­r­ial to pro­tect our­selves. The ICU was al­ways full and peo­ple were dying at the door of the hos­pi­tal be­cause there was no place to put them. The med­ical staff gave it their all, but the re­sources were in­suf­fi­cient. It was im­pos­si­ble to be pre­pared in ad­vance be­cause no one could have ex­pected a pan­demic of this mag­ni­tude,” she says.

This nurse from Badalona con­tin­ues to talk about “col­lapse in the hos­pi­tal” but quickly points out that, for­tu­nately, now “the sit­u­a­tion is not com­pa­ra­ble to the first wave, and we hope to never go back to that.” Riba has seen peo­ple of very dif­fer­ent ages die as a re­sult of Covid-19, from peo­ple in their thir­ties to those over eighty. And she has seen them die alone, with­out the com­pany of their loved ones. “It’s a ter­ri­ble ex­pe­ri­ence. You take the hand of some­one you barely know to try to make up for the lack of their fam­ily, even though that is ir­re­place­able,” she ex­plains, vis­i­bly af­fected but aware that the med­ical staff is play­ing a key role in this cri­sis. And their ex­am­ple of re­sis­tance con­tin­ues, even though there are many peo­ple who still suf­fer con­se­quences from the dif­fi­culty of the ex­pe­ri­ence they have been through. “Even now we dis­cuss what those first weeks were like and we still can’t be­lieve it,” she says.

But does the ICU nurse think that any pos­i­tive con­clu­sions can be drawn from such a sit­u­a­tion? Mer­itx­ell is very clear: “Oh yes. The sol­i­dar­ity and team spirit that every­one in the hos­pi­tal has shown. We’re a team and we all do our very best. That’s the best in­ter­pre­ta­tion I can give,” she says.

covid sto­ries