Gabi

"We are soldiers of God"

We are living in a historic situation for humanity. Circumstances in which the most genuine elements of the human being emerge. Today we have the privilege of chatting with someone on the "front lines" of this battle: Gabi.

  We are today with Gabriela Fernández, ICU nurse at the San Carlos Hospital in Madrid, and mother of three children.

Yes, Martín, the oldest, who is six years old, is already seven, Mateo, the middle one, three years old, and Lucas, the youngest, who is almost two.

  And Carlos's wife, a doctor too. An entire family dedicated to health work.

Yes, when we tell it they tell us: “you are like Grey's Anatomy ”, hehe Nothing further, because we met in a very different environment, but I think that “Birds of a feather flock together”. We have been married for ten years, we were dating for four years, he was my second boyfriend, and he is the love of my life. And we share something very big, which is trying to take care of people.

    I know it is starting at the end, but we are living in a unique and historic situation. You are one of those many people who every afternoon at eight o'clock we go out to the balcony to applaud. One of those people who are on the “front line”, leaving their skin defending us and helping us in this battle that we are waging against the coronavirus. It is a very broad question, but how are you living this situation?

Personally it is being a very big challenge. Until now I was a nurse, doing what I do best, and trying to do my best, and from one day to the next, the whole reality changes, the way you work, like the human team, like the patients. 100% of my colleagues have seen ourselves in a daily change, having to adapt every day. Every day we try to extract love, desire, strength ..., with fear, with uncertainty and with sometimes almost non-existent security conditions.

I'd say this is bringing out the best in ourselves. We are living really hard situations and I think that the health workers are not yet ready to truly verbalize them, at least in my case. I think it is a situation that will take time, especially to be able to conceptualize everything we are experiencing. All the looks we have received from our patients, that empathy, putting yourself in the place of the patient in front of you, badly, and that you know has a story behind, a story that you don't know.

If all goes well, then you get to talk to them, get to know them, because you've seen them "at their worst." Today I was telling a patient. Today I felt really tired, I arrived at the ICU, and a week ago my bag was stolen at the hospital. That day, when I realized that my bag had been stolen, I had to leave a woman in the ICU dying. I went to my locker praying for this lady that, whatever it had to be, it would be in peace. Then I found myself with my personal situation that made me have to be away from my professional life for three days, and when I returned to the hospital on Monday, that lady was sitting on the couch, breathing alone and beginning to speak. I said: "You are very big, because when I left here you were very ill, and coming here today and finding you like this is the best of my gifts".

Today I have dedicated myself to giving that same patient massages, putting music on her, braiding her hair, talking to her about what she is going to cook ... feedback (feedback) with very special patients. They need us and we need them. This is bringing out the best in ourselves.

  Of course, it is a very unique situation, in which the families cannot be there with our families and it is you who are there, giving them everything that we cannot ...

Yes, it is eight hours of work, or nine, or twenty-four if you are on call, in which you are with your patients. When I get to the hospital and put on my diving suit, my glasses and the thousand things I have to wear, I say to myself: “I have to do well for them and they also have to do well for me”. So I have to do everything I can to get smiles and because the feedback be good.

You see in patients a tremendous desire to live, and that gives me such great satisfaction that I do whatever it takes to be their daughter, their granddaughter, their niece and make this a little more enjoyable.

  We are all learning many things from what we are living. Medicine as a science will also learn and will surely change after this. You have spoken twice about feedback with patients, do you think medicine will learn something from the relationship with patients after this health crisis?

Look, I think that all this is going to lead us to a humanization, to overcome that idea that the doctor only comes to give a technical contribution. Today, for example, I have been with a head of the ICU, a man who is very good at what he does and had always considered it very serious, and today a dance with me was scheduled for a patient. In the real moment of having to empathize with the patient, we are becoming more human.

I may be wrong with all this, but the patient in front of me is "super bad." And this can be carried into all medicine, whether it is treating a splinter on the finger or a COVID-19 as it is right now. The deontological code begins by empathizing with the suffering of the person in front of me, and that sometimes we forget. In our day-to-day lives, there comes a time when we go so fast that we pay more attention to the work that the patient can give us and not to what that means for him. Whether it is a splinter on a finger, for the patient it can be very important, it is his ailment. This part of COVID-19 is one of the things that I hope will stay with us forever.

It is true that we health workers have been called "super heroes", but if I ask the 50 people who are working in the service of the ICU, whether they are health personnel, orderlies or cleaning, if you ask, they have all had someone affected by this situation closely. Some are in better or worse condition, but I have seen doctors, nurses, who have lost their grandparents and who have not been able to bury them, and who are still there at the foot of the canyon. I'll tell you about it and it makes my hair stand on end, but that's the way it is.

My mother is a cancer patient, sometimes she is fine and sometimes not, I call her every day when I leave the hospital, and the other day her neighbor across the street had died ... and that is also part of her ailment. If there is something that I believe that all this will leave us from medicine, it is knowing how to understand the patient in a more comprehensive way, not only from the disease, but also from the heart. I am what I am seeing.

I would tell you that I am in love with the reaction that I am seeing right now in one hundred percent of my colleagues, with the patients and with each other. Being able to help each other, that: "Go to rest a little, now I'm staying". And not be thinking about: "this pound" or "the other has more days”. This has given us a very high level of fellowship and humanity.

  This year 2020 is the international year of nurses and midwives. Doing a little bit of history, how was your vocation born? Why did you decide to study nursing?

The other day I was just talking about it with my parents, and they told me: “you were always aware of things in detail ". I am very from Florence NightingaleI also studied with his texts during his career, it is a myth for nursing in general. But no one told me about her until I started my degree.

My mother told me: “if dad had a sore throat, you were there to make sure he didn't miss the cream on his feet, or the glass of water, so he wouldn't have to get up, to the detail of all the care”. And I think it came from there.

Then I was lucky enough to be able to collaborate in Peru, in a volunteer service that I did with the parish, with a Christian movement called Cursillos de Cristiandad. We went to Peru, I was seventeen years old, and what you had to do was take care. We had no other task. I went with my brother, who later became a teacher, but at that time we only had to take care of what we did best at that time, which was with our hearts. And there I raised the idea a bit, then I did second year of high school and said: "care, well nursing".

  One of the things we read between the lines of what you tell us is that, as a result of the situation we are experiencing, society itself has "revised" its attitude towards health personnel. Do you think there is a greater sensitivity or understanding of what this vocation means?

I believe that yes, that in the reception of patients and society, there is a greater sensitivity. But at the same time, I think that, as I said before, we still need to be able to conceptualize all this and express it so that society comes to understand us. The impact of what we are experiencing, on us health personnel, is very great, and perhaps we have not yet been able to convey this well.

But yes, of course I think there is an abysmal generosity. The other day an acquaintance told me: "Don't worry, when all this has happened and you are tired, we will be the ones who will stand up for you". That touched my heart and I think it is true, that from now on we are going to see each other more as a family.

 Gabi, we have known you as a communicator rather than as a nurse. It can be said that, today, whoever has an Instagram profile somehow has a television program open to the world. How did the Instagram account of "@Gabitecuida"?

@gabitecuida was born, because before I was a mother I started working in pediatric and neonatal ICU. And the hospital has a very beautiful dynamic, which I think is very practical for healthcare personnel. We start with the middle part, which are medium care, babies who are to gain a little weight before going home. They are short stays and very "light" care, let's say. When I started I did not know how to change a diaper.

Then from there you are transferred to neonatal intensive care, where you spend a good time, carrying premature babies, nursing care, and then pediatrics. And there I understood that the pediatric patient is not only the pediatric patient, but often includes more care for the family as a whole.

Then I became a mother, and I had the experience of being a patient myself in my second pregnancy, with a premature child.

Until then, with my first child, I used to consult in pediatrics, the typical things to friends, "I have had a child and he has colic, what should I do?". But when Mateo, my premature son, was born and I went through that experience, I came home and even having professional experience in premature babies, it made a world for me.

I was a mother for the second time, I'm supposed to know everything by now. But I have a premature child at home, with the fear that that implies. So there Carlos, my husband, who is a great impulse to @gabitecuida he told me: "You who are so dedicated to helping everyone, do something in which you can reach more people." And there it started @gabitecuida.

It was also a source of inspiration for great friends who are dedicated, like me, to the health issue, to be able to start taking care at home when possible. And this has helped many families.

Many times I do not have the time, because the social network Instagram is, as you have said, like a free television channel. But I try, through this medium, to give a positive view of things, to recognize things well done, to show that anything can be done. Above all, he appeared for that, to help families with their first child, or when problems arise with children at home and can be solved or solved. Always with a professional script.

  It can be said that you were a forerunner of where we are going now: online healthcare.

Who was to say? But yes, it is so, we are going in that direction. And we are also working hard from the hospital to be able to bring this care from home and in a more personalized way.

 Yto end, in this section of "Alawa Women" we try to show the beauty that emanates from the lives of concrete women like yours. Because of the place you have occupied and occupy today, you have been a direct witness to much suffering. Have you been able to glimpse in those experiences, something of beauty?

Totally, and I think it is the basis of my way of looking at life.

Look, I'm going to tell you a personal experience that has marked my life. As I told you, I have a mother in the oncological process, which also leads to a lot of suffering, but if there is a person who has marked me in this regard, it is a close friend.

This friend was involved in a tragic situation, a fire. She had to jump out of a window, she had to throw her son, her husband jumped too. Her entire family died.

The life of this close friend marked a before and after in my life.

She, living this suffering so closely, has not stopped smiling. As she says, she doesn't stop seeing every flower that has grown near that house, where her entire family has died.

I have always been a very positive person in life, but since this event I have changed. Life inevitably brings you suffering, but it depends a lot on how you live it. How we integrate them into the path of our own life. It is true that it is not easy, but within suffering there is always beauty. If you look at the detail, there is always a look of light, you can always see another path through which you can go ahead and find the goal. It is a very personal job of seeing, day by day, the beauty of everything. And this starts with the simple things. I take a shower, take the shampoo, and begin to read the words on the label, and with the letters that each ingredient begins with, I begin to make words of affection, to tell you something. Enjoy every little thing that happens to us every day. Because life is very generous with us, very generous. A sunset, a light from some clouds, you just have to try to see it and take it from day to day.

  I have seen that they have given you a Grammy, and that, how was it?

That was tremendous! We have some friends who love us very much. And my husband, apart from being a surgeon, is very “rocker”. At home we have musical instruments everywhere, we have guitars, pianos ... Well, he has a close friend, who is a music producer, and he's very good. And he empathized with both of us a lot. His wife passed away two years ago with a brain tumor. We have always been very close to them. And she told us: “I feel very grateful to you, and I want to thank the world for the work of the health workers at this moment, and I want to do it through you, who know you, and I know that you are giving your life in this. My life is music, and the best thing I have is a Grammy " (Well, he has three) So, my husband said to Carlos: "You, as you have a doctor's card and you can circulate around Madrid quietly, take the Grammy and take it to the doctors."

And my husband took it to his hospital, which is King Juan Carlos in Móstoles, on the suburbs of Madrid. He took it to an ICU nurse, who has been there, practically without sparing, from the beginning. And you should have seen everyone's reaction, it was impressive. Joy and excitement, everyone wanted to take photos with the award, the patients too.

And Carlos told me: "You are part of this too". So he left it with me with a thank you note for what we were doing, and of course I took it to the front line. And it has been a rush for everyone!

  And do you see it as a "privilege" to be on the front line?

Well I tell you frankly yes. Everyone around me tells me "But how have you not been tested yet, whether you have caught this bug or not?" And I tell you that, for me, it has been a “super challenge”, as I said at the beginning, but, above all, it has been a privilege. Being able to be so close and hold a hand, comb a patient, give him a fresh yogurt when they haven't eaten anything in a month ... And then, that moment when you take the tube from the patient, after a month, and he opens her eyes and she responds… it is so so great… that without a doubt, it is a privilege.

  Of course we all wish that if it were our turn or our loved ones, there would be someone like that next to us or those we love ...

We are soldiers of God!

Instagram: @gabitecuida