Usually their voices are not heard, but they have a story to tell! On the occasion of International Nursing Day, we continue our cycle of interviews with healthcare professionals with two very different and dissimilar women who have chosen the same destiny.
Nurse Angela Zabrodnaya
Elena Aleksandrovna Shmakova She works as a senior nurse of the consultative and diagnostic nephrological outpatient department of the City Clinical Hospital No. 52, the only department in Russia where patients are consulted and monitored after transplantation of any organs.
Angela Vadimovna Zabrodnaya – Chief Nurse of the Voronovskoye ICCIB. This multifunctional modern center was recently built in just a month in New Moscow.
Both women remember how they came to the profession and share their impressions of working in the new conditions caused by the COVID-19 pandemic.
Healthy Food Near Me: Why a nurse? How did this profession become your life?
Elena: Maybe everyone says so, but there are very few people among us who accidentally came to this sphere. Remain in medicine only those who are faithful to it and have already gone through everything. I have been working for 32 years and my grandmother was a mistress sister. It so happened that childhood memories are saturated with the smell of the hospital. Then the understanding came that my grandmother was doing something real, important. When I was 14 years old, I left my mother for another city and entered a medical school. She learned to be a paramedic, got to work in the countryside, in a regional hospital. On the very first day, they put me in an ambulance car with a driver, and no one else was around. At first I went to all the calls with my notes, the drivers laughed at me. But there was one wonderful driver Nikolay, I will always remember him, he helped me a lot.
When you first come to work, it is very difficult. I will never forget my first challenge. I went to see a child under one year old, he had shortness of breath, pneumonia. It was some kind of horror for me, also still a child.
In general, I remember all the first calls very well. Working in the countryside taught me just everything. We worked as doctors, as obstetricians, as surgeons, everything happened. Later she worked in the operating room of emergency dentistry and finally came to the outpatient department in our hospital. I thought that everything terrible had already happened in my life: I was in accidents and at childbirth. I thought: well, everything, everything is fine, now I am “hardened”, I sleep at home at night, everything is calm. And suddenly, once – and came COVID. A kind of professional war to go to.
Angela: From a young age I had to see how my younger brother, a month old, was saved from bilateral pneumonia. A nurse came to our home after graduating from the Red Cross courses, and the treatment was carried out at home, and I took part in it a little. My little brother was saved. Now he is an adult, traumatologist. Probably, even then, as a child, I really wanted to help people and see how my efforts lead to their recovery. This childhood experience, and I was 10 years old then, became a decisive factor in my destiny. I decided to become a nurse. And I made my dream come true! For over 30 years I have been working in Moscow healthcare.
Healthy Food Near Me: What do you think is the main advantage of your work?
Elena: It is always difficult in medicine if you work with a soul, and without a soul it is meaningless. Probably, we rarely think about it, but every day I go to work and I know that even personally my help is needed and important to some person. I have the opportunity to help people. And this is an invaluable feeling.
Angela: The most important thing in the profession of a nurse is to feel that you are useful, necessary for the patient. You help him, save him from pain, take part in the treatment. When the patient recovers, you see the result of your work with your own eyes. This is a success that is difficult to compare with anything else. When you love your profession, it cannot be otherwise. The biggest gratitude for us is to see the patient recovered when he leaves with a smile on his face and says “thank you”.
Healthy Food Near Me: What’s the hardest thing?
Elena: The plus and minus of our work is that we constantly work with people. You participate in their life every day. Some leave and are forgotten, and some remain forever. There are people who remember how I worked in the ambulance, and they still say hello to me. There are people who remember us and carry gratitude through the years. Although I just work, I just do my job responsibly. It seems to me that this should be normal, and not work carelessly.
Now a good human attitude for some reason has ceased to be the norm, but no matter how difficult it is, you need to maintain a kind attitude towards patients. I love Remarque very much and often remember his saying: “In dark times, bright people are clearly visible.”
For me, this is a life phrase. If you choose a medical profession and even just work at the reception, you need to understand that you work in a hospital. When something happens, we must be the first to come to the rescue.
Angela: Some find it difficult to remember that we are working with real people. During a pandemic, a nurse has several challenges at once. Yes, we daily perform all medical appointments and manipulations, procedures, but it is no less important to approach work in a human way. We need emotional help, psychological. Patients are confused, they do not understand what is happening. When the patient trusts the nurse and sees the feedback, the healing process goes better.
The profession of a nurse is a difficult, thorny path, and only those people who really love their job choose it. They succeed in everything.
Healthy Food Near Me: Since we are talking about the virus, how has work changed in a pandemic?
Elena: You always need to work responsibly and with focus, but now this is the most important thing. You understand that you have no right to get infected, otherwise your relatives, patients, colleagues will get sick. Naturally, you treat your patients even more carefully. You understand how hard it is for them. If earlier I could go up to them once or twice on duty, now I will go up to them three or four times. Just to ask, “How are you?” It is clear that they are sick and scared, it is very difficult for them. Believe me, the disease is very difficult, and I really want to help these people. They have high fever, chills, someone is connected to oxygen machines. They don’t know what will happen next. Only we can somehow support them. At least in a word, because how else. “Good morning! How did you sleep? The sun is outside! “
Our branch cannot close for COVID. Without receiving drugs, patients will experience rejection of implanted organs. They must be under our constant supervision, especially since we have people in our department on programmed hemodialysis with an artificial kidney. We adjusted the work of the outpatient department during this “war” time, and I went to the inpatient department to help my girls, nurses.
There, among others, I saw and recognized several of my former patients. And they somehow recognized me, although in equipment it is not easy. I support them, I try to cheer them up.
After going through dialysis, through transplants, when organs are already starting to work, people finally begin to live. And suddenly a disease comes that can interfere with the final recovery. Only everything worked out – and again hospitals.
They are scared, hard and very upset to face this. COVID is very difficult for nephrological patients. Not only do they have their own diseases, they are on immunosuppression, and if the virus is still attached … No, COVID is, of course, very difficult.
Angela: The work has changed dramatically, I can say this taking into account my more than 30 years of experience. Medical staff wear personal protective equipment. This is an additional outfit: all 24 hours you need to be in overalls, which does not allow air to pass through well, goggles sometimes fog up, plus a specialized respirator, shoe covers, gloves.
In personal protective equipment, you must first work out, and then remove them correctly so that there is no contamination of everything around. By the way, we also take a hygienic shower so that, after leaving the “red” zone, we can continue to work, communicate with colleagues and family without harming them.
When a person puts on a mask just to get to the store, he is already uncomfortable, and in PPE it is even more difficult. In the pre-trial detention center, we carry out delicate medical procedures and resuscitation measures, but we are fighting for the patient’s life to the end. This is a difficult task, and nevertheless, nurses are trying and moving towards a common goal for us – to make more patients recover.
Healthy Food Near Me: There is an opinion that nurses in hospitals support everything. Do you agree?
Elena: I have heard that a hospital is compared to a theater: as a theater begins with a coat rack, a hospital begins with a nurse. And there is. The nurse is the first to receive the patient, to meet him. I always tell my employees in the department: put yourself in his place. Imagine what he went through before getting to us in nephrology. As you look at him, so the person will treat you, so he will make contact. The better the contact is, the faster the recovery goes.
A nurse spends most of her life with a patient. And sometimes the patient says things to his sister that he would never say to the doctor. These can be little things that are very important in the treatment. Medicine is impossible without nurses. They are not just assistants, they are special people who do more than just their job. This is psychological support for both the doctor and the patient. This is a very big responsibility. Of course, the doctor will prescribe treatment, but not only recovery, but the life of the patient depends on the correct and timely implementation of the procedures. If the nurse does not do it responsibly …
No, it cannot be that a sister does not do something when a person’s life is at stake. This is why nurses need to understand where they are going. You can’t pick up and leave work. You came to this life, you live by it.
Angela: Nurses and doctors are one team. A nurse is now a more independent, let’s say, unit of the treatment process than it was before. She is entrusted with more tasks and is competent enough to solve them without resorting to the help of a doctor. It bears a higher responsibility today.
Many nurses receive higher nursing education on their own initiative, which was not the case before. I myself am one of those nurses who continued their studies in adulthood. And with each new step in the profession, responsibility grows, you need to be ready for this.
Healthy Food Near Me: Tell us about the most unforgettable patient or about a non-standard work situation that has become a professional bike.
Elena: When I just graduated from college and worked in an ambulance, I was called for childbirth. The road was covered with snow, finally we arrived, barely made our way. They took this woman away. I tell her like this, with confidence: “We will get there!” I personally never delivered a baby, especially in a car, and it was a “loaf” in which you can fry in the summer and turn into ice in the winter. And this woman says to me: “No, baby, we are going to give birth now!” The driver said: “I’d rather be eaten by the wolves, but I won’t listen to it.” And I was left alone with the woman in labor. Of course, I knew what to do, we were taught. But, apparently, I had frightened eyes. She patted me on the hand: “Don’t worry, baby! I have the seventh birth, I will help you. ” This is how I gave birth for the first time on my own, and it is difficult to say who helped whom more: I am a woman in labor or she is for me. A healthy little boy was born.
Angela: There were many such situations. The first 15 years I worked at the GKB No. 1 named after N.I. Pirogov, she started in the trauma department. She was on duty and received victims in almost all emergencies that took place in Moscow – I remember what we and the whole city went through after the terrorist attack on Dubrovka. But now, for some reason, I remembered how we were on duty together with the nurse, and they brought to us a builder who fell from the scaffolding during the construction of the Cathedral of Christ the Savior. We, two small women, faced such a problem: we had to put a tall man under two meters in height with fractured hips into bed. And we did it!
There are no impossible tasks for a nurse. She will stop the galloping horse, and will enter the burning hut. If the task is set, it will be completed.
Healthy Food Near Me: If you could address all your patients – both future and present – what would you say? What would you wish them?
Elena: Remember, COVID is temporary. Take care of yourself, take care of each other. Without mutual concern, some kind of imbalance always happens in the world. This imbalance is now called COVID. But even when it seems that there is one continuous negative around, one should rejoice in every day and little things – the sun, a fresh leaf on a tree, a flower that has just blossomed.
Angela: I wish you to always trust and trust doctors and nurses. It seems to me that not everyone appreciates us. I wish we were appreciated a little more. And I wish everyone to be healthy! Happy Holidays to all nurses. Colleagues, I wish you good health, love your profession – this is the main thing!
Photo Shoot: personal archive, press service