Cashiers, teachers, caregivers … On the occasion of March 8, international women’s rights day, franceinfo highlights these heroines, these women on the front line for a year and the start of the Covid-19 epidemic. At the hospital, women are in the majority in the professions of nursing assistants and nurses. Sylvie is a nurse at the Chambéry hospital.
The first impression on meeting her is her “quiet strength” side, 27 years of nursing career behind her. During the two waves of Covid, this skinny brunette, who works in outpatient surgery, did not hesitate to come and lend a hand to her colleagues to treat patients suffering from the coronavirus. “Like all of them in fact, I think we all went there”Sylvie remembers today.
“The first wave, we all went really headlong, with a lot of confidence and then a little innocence.”
Sylvie, nurse
to franceinfo
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She then discovers a terrible epidemic, the inability to treat, for lack of sufficiently effective drugs. Sylvie and her colleagues compensate: “There was our presence already, human. I think we were very present, especially since the families could not come to see the patients in the usual way”. The second wave is even stronger, Sylvie no longer counts her overtime. “No one has ever had so many deaths in such a short period of time, with a feeling that it won’t stop. We were like ‘when is this going to end?”
Sylvie paid “physically” for her commitment, falling ill twice from the Covid. A first time in March: “We barely had the mask on and it wasn’t actually recommended.” A second time in the fall: “We had meal breaks or snacks in offices which are very small, in fact”. Was she very ill? She doesn’t want to say more, not the type to feel sorry for herself.
The nurse remembers things from this epidemic in the hospital: “I think we learned, as caregivers and humans, that we are also vulnerable.” Sylvie is just recovering from this intense fatigue and yet, if there is a third wave, she will volunteer, again: “Of course, without hesitation. It’s my job, so as long as I am a nurse in the hospital, of course that I will continue to work, like the majority”. But this possible third wave, she assures, will weigh more on her shoulders.
Portrait of Sylvie, nurse in Chambéry
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