«If you wake up in the morning and you see that you are still alive, you have a divine mission to fulfill».
This saying that the Lord placed before my eyes at a difficult and hard time in my life, is accompanying me every morning as a call to renew my «yes» and so, I confidently devote myself to the mission He entrusts to me, being certain that, wherever I go, He precedes me. May be that is why, given the reality of the pandemic that in a strong and hard way surprised all of us, I never was afraid, and, on the contrary, even intuitively knowing that it would not be easy, I felt happy and grateful to the Lord for the privilege to stand on the front line.
During more than 35 years caring for the sick, I have undergone through tough and difficult situations, but also through more others, full of hope and life. However, the experience of the pandemic has forced us all, not only to consider a new way to understand the life, but also to a new way of working, facing and sharing our fight in order to improve every day the health and the life quality of our patients.
At the beginning everything was consternating and in our hospital there was a lot of confusion. We were receiving from everywhere new instructions, steps, protocols … All that was known to us and we could dominate, transformed in a few hours and for us all, into something disconcerting, uncontrollable, invisible and, even worse, it got the «death taste and color»; that was something real because more and more anguished and frightened patients were occupying the beds, feeling that they had been torn away from their loved ones and experiencing a deep loneliness. At that first moment, when all our securities were falling down, I could experience God’s strength and the grace of abandonment and trust in Him: as well I realized that, if we were letting Him to act through us, all our energy was multiplying and becoming creative. That is how the miracle happens.
Our surgery unit, where patients enter with a specific health problem and leave restored in their health, quickly became a “Covid unit” where nothing was programmable, calculable or predictable and we could not give clear answers to the questions the sick people were asking us. This impotence forced us all, even the most distant from God, to acquire attitudes of humility, dialogue and common searching out and also to acknowledge that, without a divine intervention, we would not be able to face this situation.
For me it has always been important to take care of the sick person as a whole and during this experience I have much more deeply and clearly perceived that «saving lives», does not consist only in healing the body, but that it is possible to “save life” also accompanying, with God’s care, mercy and tenderness, the path towards death, considered as a step and beginning of a new life that has reached its fullness.
Sometimes it is very difficult to tell the patient, through words or simply through silence, that his life is slipping away from him and that it is humanly difficult to stop this process, but however, I could experience that the truth may become a source of peace and acceptance. I remember that a patient told me: «Thank you because you are the first person who listened to me and, fearlessly, did not hide me the truth, giving me false hopes because I know that my life is ending» and another patient said to me: «Excuse me for talking to you so much, but when one feels confident, it is easier to speak and speaking contributes to reduce fear”.
If suffering is a hard experience, it is much more so when we live it alone and far from the persons that, in that moment more than in others, we need they be by our side. I do not forget the expression of emotion and gratitude on the face of a sick woman when I gave her the bag with things that her daughter brought her: although she could not see her, she said with immense joy: “My daughter has been here!” and when she took the bag it was as if she were holding her daughter in her arms. I remember also a patient who, with such a great joy and pride welcomed the buns that his son, each day before going to work, was leaving at the hospital reception for his father’s breakfast.
Accompanying loneliness has been a great challenge and I have felt myself always accompanied by God’s hand. In the first days, when I entered into a room, a sick woman told me: «With all the protection you wear on, I see that you are all the same and I do not know who is the person entering and taking care of me». In that instant I realized how it was important to be present beside the patient, for whom we were the only human contact, to stop and, through silence, a word, a gesture, a look, a way of touching, listening and welcoming, to offer him warmth and humanity and to create a relationship that could fill, even if only a little, his heart emptiness and claim. «There is no possibility of tenderness in accelerated rhythms, because tenderness germinates in silence and listening». The Lord granted me to be able to «stay” next to the sick and in the middle of work, movement and sometimes rushing, I got the gift of phrases like these: «Will I see you also tomorrow?»; «I recognize you because your eyes always smile»; «You are an angel for me» or «I have been thinking about what we said yesterday» …
Along with our task of caring for and accompanying the sick, we had also to face a new way of accompanying families, especially in the strong and hard moments of farewell or mourning when we were the only human possibility of contact and it was not easy for us to control our emotions. But once again, I considered a privilege to be able to transmit, despite the pain, a lot of love and strength. In my heart I still keep the words that a daughter asked me to tell to her mother who, for several days, was living between life and death: “Tell my mother that she may leave and she will continue to take care of each one of us and of the family, from heaven”. A few hours later, the Lord welcomed her into heaven. This is how the Lord works, in a silent, hidden and mysterious way.
Another tough situation I never thought it would be possible to live was the lack of available beds in the ICU (Intensive Care Unit) and we had to choose between two patients in order to profit better the technical care. After a long dialogue to assess the situation, we agreed to wait one more day before deciding, I strongly prayed to the Lord that, if possible, He would free us from making such a decision and a miracle took place: when, the following day, I arrived to the hospital, they informed me that one of the patients had improved and the other remained stable.
With an immense gratitude I can say that, day after day, and especially when tiredness, emotions, uncertainty and pain merge together, it has been a great gift for me, to rely on the presence, listening, understanding and unconditional support of the sisters of my community.
Many times, in tough situations of suffering and helplessness, we asked ourselves: «Where is God in all that?” But the answer to this question is not in words but in the experience of faith in God who loves us, suffers with us and manifests that Himself is accompanying us with great mercy and tenderness; he is a God who also needs us and likes to count on us, entrusting us every day «a divine mission to fulfill.»
For everything: «Praised be my Lord!»
M.R.A.R.
(The author of this article is a nurse Capuchin Tertiary Sister, who likes to remain anonymous)