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“It is human to try to return to normality, even to the same old mistakes”
Ana Polegre (Nurse in Distress)
Although for a couple of months everyone left at 20.00:XNUMX p.m. to applaud the work of the toilets during the hardest days of confinement, the pandemic has dragged on and now, at the peak of infections and deaths, it seems that it has been forgotten the constant work done by doctors and nurses to try to bend the situation and help everyone. Therefore, to focus on this work, and not let it be forgotten, Ana Polegre, better known as “Nurse in Trouble”, has compiled in “Coronavirus” (Zenith) a multitude of stories in which nurses who have been on the front line, they tell their experience …
What Ana Polegre seeks is to give a voice to all those health workers who have given everything for us and who need and deserve to be heard. The book contains truth. Contains shocking, heartbreaking, exciting stories and very, very, real that nurses and all health personnel have lived during the Covid-19 crisis, “explains the author at the beginning of this. She, a nurse by training and vocation, and also an illustrator, through «Nurse in Trouble» seeks disseminate about the difficulties of the nursing community, and to be able to contribute their grain of sand. We spoke with her at ABC Bienestar about how the group of nurses today needs more support than ever, and if it is true that “we are going to get better” out of all this.
Why is it so important to make the nursing community visible, something that you do with your daily work, at a time like the present?
It seems very important to me, I have been doing it for years, and right now I think it is very important to do it through the book because, despite the fact that it seems that at the beginning of the pandemic the value that corresponds to nursing was given, already the struggle that was taking place in the midst of this madness, the work that is done is still forgotten. Both the nursing profession and the rest of health workers are highly exploited professions with a lot of precariousness and problems. I think it is important to know what they do, what they fight and everything they have done despite all the abuse they have suffered and continue to receive.
The stories you tell in the book all have a common denominator: they are very difficult to manage on a physical and especially emotional level. Do you think it is important to give psychological support to nurses?
It is fundamental, it is something that, when I studied the degree, I missed. I remember seeing something far above, how to deal with certain things, such as communicating a death, but I found the training on the psychological level to be deficient, both in dealing with people and dealing with one’s own feelings. You deal with people at very vulnerable moments in your life and it is very important. Now, in the wake of the pandemic, there is a great need for psychological help in the sector. We have colleagues with mental disorders, with depression, taking casualties; they can’t take it anymore. Apart from what has been suffered, they have not stopped working, they have not had time to heal the wounds of everything they have seen.
What can we do to support a nurse, or a health worker, if we have someone close by?
I think that right now the most helpful thing is to follow the recommendations, the problem is that the third wave is here and it is a situation like what was experienced in March in this country. So, taking care of ourselves is double and trying to do it well. At another level, it is a time to support all health workers, because many rights are being trampled on, and it is essential that the entire population reach out to health workers. We all need to rest, and right now it is something that is not taken into account.
What would you say to people who are overwhelmed by being home for a long time, who feel like they can’t take any longer without seeing their family, to stay “strong”?
I too am a person, like everyone else, who has been in this situation for a year. It is very hard to stay in such a situation for so long. Apart from the restrictions, psychologically living the process of having your freedoms taken away from you, and not being able to do certain things… But we have been here for a year now, we already have the vaccine here and I continue that it is very important to do it well in the final stretch. You have to put up with a little more, be at home and take advantage of the time that that gives us.
Lately we talk a lot about resilience, a term that is used so much that it is even distorted. What, then, do we have to understand as resilience?
For me it is overcoming the natural bumps of life, and doing it in the best way that you can and know how to do. In the end we are all dealing in continuous learning with life. So you have to “live” calmly, respecting your own time.
In March, April, a lot of people said, “We’re going to get better out of this.” Do you think this is going to be the case, that we are going to learn to value things better?
It is very difficult, because it is something very intrinsic to the human being, in the end traumatic experiences are a very big shock, and something changes within you. But, with the passage of time, this returns to normal. I am telling you from my own experience: I suffered from thyroid cancer three years ago and there are certain things that change radically at first. You think “I am going to take advantage of this”, “I am going to live, to enjoy the moments”, and in the end over the years you return to the dynamics of stress, of work, of day to day. So it seems like I feel and say, “I haven’t learned anything,” and you have to remember what happened. I think that in general, if there will be something left in the people who have been more empathetic with the situation of the pandemic, because they have had to experience something first hand, or the health workers … but it is human to try to return to normality, even to mistakes .
What do you think we can all learn from nurses right now?
The ability to work, and the ability to help. In the end they have gone to war without weapons; they have not thought about it. They have doubled shifts, they have replaced colleagues who were on leave because they had contracted the disease, taking hours of sleep, family, life. And all this is for a vocation, because, if it is not them, who are the ones who are going to help you? In the end, it is a great vocation and professionalism.