This Monday March 8 is International Women’s Rights Day. France Bleu Alsace decided this Monday morning to draw the portrait of a committed woman who fought throughout the year 2020 and who is still on the front line right now.
Vicenta Franja is a nurse in an intensive care unit where she takes care of many patients with Covid-19 at the Strasbourg civil hospital.
This 51-year-old woman has been in intensive care for 23 years. But the pandemic has completely changed her daily life, without her seeing the end of the tunnel for the moment: “It’s a marathon, we can’t see the end of it. It’s every day, every day. We’re exhausted. We don’t have this little light that says that at some point we will manage to breathe“.
During this year, Vicenta helped heavy patients, frequented death. She hasn’t seen her relatives either. Maximum precaution not to contaminate anyone. “There is no longer that safety valve that we usually have, where in the evening we have a little aperitif, then we no longer have it, and it’s very complicated “, she says.
Today she is still at the front, nurse and sometimes much more than that: “The nurse is everything. Plumber, electrician, multitasking. And a big part of a psychologist. Because patients talk to us. And the patients at the moment, they are very anxious “, she explains.
That only happens to other people
Most do not applaud him at your window, Vicenta Franja, no longer wishes: “There now, personally, someone should not applaud me, because I would become hysterical. Because I see too much the unconsciousness of people. I understand that it is difficult, but flute what! The best consideration is to respect the barrier gestures, and to be vaccinated if there is a possibility“. Because the nurse specifies: “Today we still think that this only happens to others. This is wrong. I see the other side, in the hospital. Our patients are getting younger and younger,” she says.
So is Vicenta Franja a 2021 heroine? “I don’t feel like a heroine at all, but like a nurse doing her job, in a particular context “, she says.
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