Dear Friends,
Time flies, and now I am here again to share with you my perspective from Bergamo.
We changed time zone, and now we have long and pleasant days, with beautiful daylight till pretty late in the afternoon.
These are the exact days of the year in which we really feel the spring, the miracle of the new life coming after the cold months of winter.
Is the re-birth of life, basically the definition of Hope, and I am living the beginning of this new season with a unpredictible energy.
The emergency is still ongoing, but the mitigation manoevrs and the expantion of resources dedicated to this ilness seem to lead us to an apparent break in the spread of the plague. We are stopping the surge.
I am still working in the ICU, I still assist people that are fighting for their life and I am still talking to their relatives, sometime with tiny flames of hope, some other with more rigid and squared words.
Most of the time with no news at all, I call them only to say that the situation is kept stable.
I am still living by myself in a suspended world, between the bip-bip of the alarms in the ICU and the Cip-Cip of the birds outside of the hospital.
I never paid that much attention to the reborn of nature like in these days. It seems to me a powerful scream that I never really considered.
Maybe because It is the first time I am working in a hospital close to the countryside. Or maybe because it is the first time I am spending so much time by myself out of the working shift.
So COVID 19 slows down, and we are of course very happy about it. We can stop for a recap and consider the issues we are facing, getting ready for the next actions.
We are starting to reopen some activities, with a mix of fear and desire to step forward.
Our operating rooms are starting to get ready to come back to work, the PACU where we were taking care of 10 COVID patients has been reorganized and the patients divided in between the other 5 ICUs of the hospital that are still working with this disease.
We are dismissing patients from ICU only after they are really stable, and we have time to give more accurate and empatic information to relatives, that still are not admitted into the hospital to visit their beloved.
Spring’s wind seems to have brought hope. And I persist in blowing into this wind.
But I don’t want to forget the dark days. I want to keep track of the issues that we experienced while we were underwater, so that tomorrow, when we will be back on the rocks again, we will have at least the right questions to try to answer.
1- Still is flipping me out: ”I have 1 bed and 10 people that need that bed. How should I allocate that resource”.
In a “finite world”, how should I manage “infinite requests”.
I am still wondering how to get into granular answer to this question; which are the variables that I need to consider.
Time of presentation?
Age of the patient?
Is the patient a relative of some friend?
Is the patient a relative of mine?
Is the patient me?
2- Luigi Pirandello, a famous italian writer of 1800 and 1900, was talking about the “Lantern doctrine”.
He was describing the human being as a pelegrin, a walker. And he was descibing the values, the deep Believes of everyone’s soul as the lantern that help to keep the track at night time.
We are collectively facing a long night, and I interrogate myself on which are the Lanterns that are leading us. My path, my local community path, and my global community path.
Faith in God? Faith in money? Faith in a political idea? Faith in a soccer team? Faith in compulsive need to accumolate and to consume ( especially pasta and toilet paper!) ?
3- Two years ago I rowed the river Po.
It is the longest river in Italy, and with a crazy friend we started our adventure in Pavia and switching couple of rivers, we arrived until Venice, after 450 km and 7 days.
It has been an open air gym ( after seven days of rowing I had two giants arms!) and especially a social lab, a social experiment.
We were 2 friends on the same tiny canoe, and every move of one involved a direct change on the other.
The best scenario? Collaboration and arriving in Venice onboard of our red small thing.
The Worst scenario? Individualism and sink.
Well, while I am listening to politics and talking with people in these days, I see in the back of my mind, the red canoe slowly pushed forward in the middle of the river Po. And I ask myself : “ How many people can fit on a canoe? Aren’t we all on the same tiny thing called Earth?”
4- “ Only a crisis, actual or perceived, produces a real change.
When that crisis occurs, the actions that are taken depend on the ideas that are lying around.
That, I believe, is our basic function: to develop alternatives to existing policies, to keep them alive and available until the politically impossible,
becomes politically inevitatable!’”
Keep it up guys,
I don’t know where this river will bring us,
but I persist to row into it with the smile.
Ciao
