With a symbolic act, managing director Bernd Wessels and numerous employees of the St. Marien Hospital Friesoythe declared the corona pandemic over: On April 8 (Saturday), when the last corona regulations were also repealed, they burned between Hospital and nursing home the last masks as well as piles of papers with rules, decrees and regulations.
“It was a challenging time,” Wessels said in retrospect, recalling the book “The Little Prince” by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, which was published exactly 80 years ago. “He landed in the desert, in the unknown, and that’s exactly what happened to us,” he said. “We didn’t know what to expect.”
“We took good care of the people entrusted to us in the Elisabethhaus and in the hospital.”Bernd Wessels, Managing Director of St. Marien Hospital Friesoythe
And Wessels drew another parallel between the corona work in the hospital and the little prince. “‘One can only see clearly with the heart’ is one of the central sentences of the book,” he recalled. Cordiality and humanity are the basis of medical work, according to Wessels. “We took good care of the people entrusted to us in the Elisabethhaus and in the hospital,” he said. Through the interaction of the two houses and with the support of the Caritas association, things went “pretty well” in Friesoythe.
Pictures like those from Italy could be avoided, for example through the close cooperation of all teams and daily crisis meetings, “but we also saw bad things, people lost their lives here too,” he drew a mixed conclusion. “Ultimately, however, we were never in a situation where it was no longer possible to regulate.” Employees of both houses then gladly took the opportunity to throw masks, decrees and ordinances into the fire bowl and thus draw an at least symbolic line under the pandemic.
