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This nurse who works in the ICU of the Alcorcón Foundation University Hospital publishes

The Last Look

, a heartbreaking book of stories, published by

La Esfera de los Libros

, which reflects her terrible experience during the Covid-19 crisis.

You were applauded on the balconies as if you were heroes, but we have forgotten the enormous emotional drain you have suffered. They have said that we are heroes without capes, but they will never know how many we have not been able to save or with how much lack of materials we have worked. These things don't really happen to heroes. Do you remember all those you couldn't save? Yes, but I try to make up for them with those we were able to save. Hospital admissions are usually the same. He is a young patient who arrives drowning and who has been holding out for many days not to go to the hospital. We have to run and endure so as not to tube them, although sometimes it is not possible. The survival statistic is very high: 15% die. That helps us because one shudders at death. You relate in the book that you told a patient that everything was going to be fine and she passed away. This was what started to trigger my nightmares. She was a very young person and we couldn't save her. Both my colleagues and I usually shake hands with patients when we go to intubate them and that phrase came out. Then I have not said it again because it hurt me a lot that he passed away. I have changed it to "don't worry" or "you're going to be sleeping for a few days." You don't dare say it again, you're going to make me emotional. It was very hard. [Cries]. Have you suffered many anxiety attacks? Yes. When you see death up close and suffering knocking on your door every day, you have to shed those professional pajamas. You are also a person. Sometimes you see yourself reflected in patients. A few days ago, a man of about 52 years came in and told me: "Don't leave me alone." In those moments, you have to leave the room because there are more patients and you think about how to manage emotions with this patient. You try to do the best you can, but the ghosts come. When things started to loosen up in the summer, that's when fear tells you: "Don't forget about me, I'm here." I have colleagues who have a hard time opening my book. I have spoken it, I have written it and I have cried it. I've even talked to the telephone psychologists. But there are people who prefer to keep it in a little piece of their heart. That is not good because you have to give it an outlet. What are those crises like? 65% of my peers and I have had post-traumatic stress symptoms, which are big words. You feel tightness in your chest, you find it difficult to breathe, you begin to feel images that you would not like to see, you re-experience situations that you would not like to live again and, suddenly, you cannot control it. Are you a torrent of negative and positive emotions? When my hospital became a field hospital and everything was an ICU, I felt like a soldier who could be hurt and I didn't know how I was going to get out. We entered and we did not know what was going to happen because the patients were very serious. "I do not want to see normality. In the ICU he passes by every day," you say in the text. Exact. People on the street have come to question us that we are very exaggerated. Time in the ICU is not free. For patients who have been in for weeks and weeks, normality does not exist. Does it make you angry when you see a terrace full of people who do not respect distances? I do not want to suffer more than I suffered in the first wave. I am trying to convert pain into value and when I see those images I think they are like those who drink, take a car, run over and kill someone. And nothing has happened to them. We are our best vaccine from the time we wake up until we go to bed. At the moment, we have no other tool. We have not managed to defeat the enemy. What has failed so that we are in the middle of the second wave? The population needs security and we are not giving it to them. You need to think that this may end at some point, but it doesn't end. There is a very high percentage of society that is turning risk into normality. If I tell you to isolate yourself, you cannot tell me that you are isolated, but that your family is coming to eat. Are there many people who are not complying with quarantines? Job insecurity also plays a role. We have had very young patients who have gone to work with symptoms, otherwise they would be fired. And that's really sad. And people who live crammed into a 50-meter flat. What do we do about that? Do you have any reproach to make to the Government? We would like them to pamper us more and take care of us. Okay, they give us an award like the Princess of Asturias, but I need to go to work feeling that citizens are not alone. I cannot work without knowing what is going to happen the next day. Does it make sense to build an emergency hospital in Madrid without hiring more doctors? Our ICU is very well equipped and can even be expanded further because we have land. They are the ones who decide what to invest in. Unfortunately, neither you nor I are going to get them to change their minds. Have you had nightmares about your own death? Yes. I hope they don't come back. When you came to a place where there were no masks and you had to beg for EPIS suits, you feel like your life is not safe. In the story

I close my eyes

, I write my own death letter because he visited me every night.

He was not able to sleep.

The psychologists recommended that I write it down, and after doing so, the nightmares began to subside.

You wrote a letter like you were already dead.

Yes, because I couldn't sleep.

I dreamed over and over again that they would kill me, that I went to the hospital and did not come out alive.

I have also felt the love of my partner, my daughters and my friends.

Far from being a sad letter, it is a love letter.

I needed to say goodbye. To make matters worse, you had to spend the worst of the pandemic alone in a hotel to avoid infecting your family.

It is the most difficult decision I have made in this life, but I think it was necessary.

From here I want to thank my two teenage daughters, who are 16 and 18 years old, for their extreme generosity in taking care of my parents.

They never called me and my mother has advanced Alzheimer's.

I adore them, as well as my partner who tried to give me small moments of happiness.

At the moment of death, what relieves the sick the most? Knowing that they are not alone.

No one in this country should die alone.

We need to touch.

There was a patient who passed away these days who was very afraid.

And I started to touch his shoulder and hand and tell him that I was not going to leave until he breathed better.

So, you saw that the vital signs improved.

That is why I speak of hunger for skin.

Can caresses be substituted?

The book is called 'The Last Look', because this disease causes those looks of panic and the unknown.

They only have you to accompany them.

The silence of the rooms is terrifying.

What goes through your head when you have to do life and death care in the same shift? At that moment, the professional suit intermingles with the person's skin.

Sometimes, after many, many weeks, you are able to lift a patient to the chair and another, right next to it, dies.

The man kissed our hands and tried to thank us without being able to speak because he still had the tube.

The gratitude that patients give us is enormous.

But, when you enter the next room and see death up close, you just have to be silent and accompany.

The mental health of the entire population is hurt, what do we need? We need to love ourselves more and judge ourselves less.

I don't even look at the hemicycle anymore, it's so unpleasant that it appears on TV every day.

They don't represent any of us.

I may have political and religious beliefs, but that cannot prevent us from fighting together.

We cannot become our enemies.

This can only be done together.

According to the criteria of The Trust Project

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