A year ago, hospitals filled for the first time with corona patients. Since then, doctors and nurses in the corona wards have been working steadily, fitted with aprons, splash goggles and mouth masks.
One of them is Ghariba Bouchtoubi, who has been a medical assistant at the Haga Hospital in The Hague since November. During the first wave she had just started in a hospital in Rotterdam. She was immediately confronted with critically ill patients who could not say goodbye to their families.
“It was the first week of the first wave, the time when patients often arrived too late to the hospital,” Bouchtoubi told Broadcaster West. Soon a patient arrived who could no longer be saved. It was her task to inform the family and to tell them that only one person was allowed to say goodbye. That conversation will always stay with her. “I’m a doctor, but doctors are people too.”
Quickly struck
Her supervisor, internist Ronne Mairuhu, also has some events from the past year etched in the memory. “What has stayed with me most over the past year is that I had a patient who was completely stable,” he says. “Everything went well and when I went to see him half an hour later we had to intubate immediately. I’ve really never seen a disease that strikes so quickly.”
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