The red zone and Intensivist Nurse Aymé's fight for life

Since March 2020, Aymé Alomá Cruz’s career has been marked by her work with COVID-19 patients in serious and critical condition as a member of one of the teams at the ICU of the Amalia Simoni Surgical Clinical Hospital in the city of Camagüey.

She spares no words to express the pride of those tasked with saving people who are fighting for their life on a hospital bed.

The dynamism and agility required to act at the right time in these situations led her to specialize in intensive care. Therefore, after graduating and finishing her social service, she worked for five years in the intermediate therapy ward. Then she went on an international mission to Venezuela and, upon her return, she joined the ICU staff at the aforementioned hospital.

Several shifts in the red zone since the first patients began to arrive were not a deterrent. Aymé keeps doing her bit in the fight against the pandemic, a bloody battle that sums up the courage of health professionals in Cuba and elsewhere.

She admits that the fear is still there, more than a year later and even when the doctors have a better control of the disease. “On the contrary, we see how people are now more easily infected and how serious their condition becomes when they come to the ICU.”

For this reason, a joint effort is paramount despite the fear caused by their degree of exposure and the risk of being near the infected.

“We make sure to check each other's protective gear; the doctors take care of the nursing staff's needs and help us in what we do,” she says, recalling the first time she scrubbed in the ICU to avoid infection. “At first we couldn't stand the masks, since we could hardly breathe, but I finally felt better thanks to the support of my colleagues, who kept telling me that it was a matter of getting used to them.”

Taking into account their initial condition, Aymé feels happy every time a patient recovers and gets well enough to go back home. However, the adjective "painful" describes very well her experience after a year of pandemic.

“I have painful memories of patients that died. Many of them hide the symptoms and come very late to the hospital, especially people over 60 with associated comorbidities,” she remarks. “Listening to them pleading, ‘Save me, save me’ is also shocking. No matter how many years you work as a nurse, you never come to accept death. It always hurts to see someone die when your duty was to save them.”

The effort, dedication and humanism of Cuban health workers remains indispensable in these times, but even when the medical resources are guaranteed success will always depend on the population’s risk perception.

Stories like that of nurse Aymé Alomá Cruz, from the province of Camaguey, not only bring to light how imperative it is to comply with the health protocols, they also show, without a doubt, the sacrifice and commitment of those who day after day risk their own lives to cure and preserve the lives of others.