The 14th night

I came to Spain as an English teacher six months ago, but have just been hired as a nurse in a hospital in need of extra hands.

It was another day in the midst of the mess. The hospital was full, and the overworked staff switched with the afternoon shift of nurses, doctors, nursing aides. Many of them had barely gotten sleep the night before. It was the height of a pandemic, and every day, they woke up, and went to work, unsure of their return in the evening. It was Day 13 of the lockdown in Spain, and no one could tell when this would end.

I knew I had to be ready for anything. Some days, medications for patients are missing, lost in the mess of all the other medicines. Some days there are enough of us to divide each floor’s 60-70 patients into threes. Some days there are 32 patients to a single nurse, and other days there are only four nurses and one doctor for the whole hospital. Like a card game, you never know what you’re in for.

Every day is different. The number of patients, their rooms, their floors, the level of care, all change in a matter of hours. The stress of making sure every patient survives takes priority. Everything else like the patient’s comfort, the patient’s families, the patient’s preferences, all take the back burner.

The floors are usually eerily quiet, except for the patients calling out from their rooms. Most of them want to go out, with some sneaking out into the streets. Most of them miss home, like the man in Room 437 whose daily routine is to attempt to remove the various tubes that led to his stomach, nose, and veins. He cries every day for his wife and desperately tries to crawl out of bed. There are days I feel bad for him, and there are days I get irritated when he cannot understand why we have to keep him there and why his wife cannot see him. I talk to him, not knowing if he understands when I tell him that his wife will be here soon, that he just has to wait and stay alive long enough for that moment. He stares back and I can see his eyes tear up, confused.

There are times I get called to help because the female nurses have some difficulty with heavily built and combative patients. I have other patients to attend to, and distractions like this takes away precious time needed to help other patients. Each family member who is in the hospital, who comes up to the nurse’s station, takes time. Each crying patient, each time the man in Room 409 rips out his IV, takes time. Once, four nurses were needed to set up a new IV for him. That took about half an hour, time away from the three floors of patients.

We don’t have time to feel bad, feel tired, feel like giving up. Whenever a patient’s family member comes up to us and gets angry because a certain medication isn’t on the day’s prescription, it takes time away from every other patient on the floor. The lives of 30 people are in a single nurse’s hands every single day, and if time is taken from them for one, the 29 others suffer. We have had patients die because of this.

Then we go home, crying for our patients. We have to come back again, tomorrow. I end up chain-smoking at the end of the day, just to keep calm. The small comforts we have are moments like that in Room 437, when number 437 held my hand as I was leaving and whispered with all his strength, “Thank you.” That was more than enough for me to come back even on my days off, because this is what we have promised our lives to, with or without thanks.

Since we only had a one-day refresher crash course, many are still in the process of relearning. In spite of this, since we were called to help, we stay true to our oath, not just to our country or our host country, but to all of humanity. We are extremely proud to represent the Philippines in this fight, and though this is very scary, we keep fighting. It is what we have promised to do, just like the frontliners back home. It is true for my cousin halfway around the world in Makati Medical Center, Dr. Sandra Villapol.

As much as we fear death, we go on because we know that the lives of our patients are more important than our fear. We will not stop.
At the end of the day, this is not a medical fight. This is humanity’s fight.
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John Matthew E. Villapol, 26, is based in Spain and has training in wilderness rescue, tactical medicine, and bleeding control.