"Despite having several doctors in my family I did not want to study Medicine, but Social Communication", these are the words of Dr. Evelyn Diana Navarro Fernández, who last July began her professional life. She took the step forward when the country needed it most, in the face of the increase of positive cases of COVID-19.
"When I was in my last year of Senior High School a very strong feeling awoke in me towards this career and I realized that it was what I truly wanted and needed in my future. At that moment I appreciated everything that was said at the 'open door' appointments at the university and I understood the degree of nobility and solidarity that exists within the profession."
From home, she has the example, and she knows that being a doctor involves risks and sacrifice, but she was sure when she entered the University of Medical Sciences of Las Tunas, she knew she was going to be a great professional and she proved it to herself during the six years of the career.
"My arrival at that center made me evolve because in the first year I had a certain immaturity. Until that moment when you start dealing with patients, getting to know their life, their problems, you don't see that you are the one who has to solve them or, at least, help make them less serious.
"In the course of those six years you grow because you learn to see life differently and to face situations with greater determination and security; you learn to see men and women as biopsychosocial beings, just as they teach you in the career and this allows you to value much more the life of people with their difficulties."
WITH COVID-19, THE CHALLENGE WAS GREATER
The COVID-19 arrived to change everyone's life, flights stop, schools and workplaces begin to work remotely. The world does not stop turning, but it does so more calmly, with fear. We all had faith in tomorrow and fear at the same time, SARS-CoV-2 does not understand faces or ages.
That small line between life and death was seen every day in the hospitals. It was they, the health professionals who had no respite, no time to think about what was happening. Among these, the medical students who have been on guard, door to door, in search of that patient with symptoms of the disease stand out.
"Our challenge required a triple effort because we had to search every day of the week. We had the teaching, no matter if there was or was not transportation or if the epidemiological situation was more complex every day. We had to get to the hospital or the university at the times established by the teaching staff. During the whole time of the pandemic we have not stopped studying, and being in the last year of the career the stress multiplies and so does the content to overcome.
"At the moment my priority is my profession, I am a first-year resident in the specialty of General Comprehensive Medicine, and right now every day I spend in front of a patient is time I spend learning because we learn when we treat someone when we make a diagnosis; we are forced to study and medicine requires that, a lot of interest and study."
FROM THE CLASSROOM TO THE RED ZONE
Starting professionally takes preparation, one might say psychological, on the part of the students who will face working life. The vacation period serves to shed their student aura or to prepare themselves for the path they are about to embark on.
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The young graduates of the medical schools did not have time to assimilate the great responsibility that was coming: the country called for them to enter its health areas in support of the tense epidemiological situation.
There was no chance to understand that they had already passed the state exam, or to overcome the stress that their families had to go through during the sleepless nights due to their studies, plus the physical exhaustion of the days they were in the hospital, even the day before the year-end exercise.
"This whole process was very hard for us, we did not have the dreamed gala in which we receive the title, or the longed-for group party in which we said goodbye to student life and, much less, we had vacations. As we would say, we burned stages!
"My arrival in the red zone did not affect me as much, perhaps as it did other graduates, because I had been there as a student a few months before, so I knew the work I had to do and I was not afraid. The only thing left for me to do was to take care of myself so as not to get infected and bring the virus to my family.
"At home, they saw it from another perspective, for them it is difficult, the worries increase, my health and the health of those who live with me depended on me. It was complex, but it's all a matter of adapting. I am a doctor, that is my job, my duty, and I have to be there for my patients. That's all I kept repeating to myself and them.
"When you face the red zone you show your worth as a human being, that's when you can understand what your patients go through, and what sensitivity, solidarity is; because you have to understand the pain of others, help alleviate that pain and transmit hope at all times.
"We also feel fear, and we take care of ourselves, we protect ourselves to the maximum, and even so it becomes inevitable at times that we get infected because nobody's life can wait when you have to come to their aid, and we run out and without realizing it we forget the mask just because a person needs first aid; we can't get into a debate at that moment. But the people in the street, in their homes, do have that time and they don't use it".
Empty streets are not to anyone's liking, but hearing a siren go off is torturous, we don't know who is in that ambulance if we know them at all. It hurts more the losses, the aftermath, the sleepless nights, the shortage of oxygen...
"My advice to the population is to take care of themselves, to take extreme hygienic measures and comply with social distancing because if we do that we can avoid the loss of so many human lives. It is painful to know that you lose a patient and it hurts much more to know that while we leave our souls in those hot suits, there are people who are capable of lowering their masks to smoke".
