Carmen is sitting in the living room reading
The Pied Piper of Hamelin
, turns the pages slowly, it is difficult for her to read.
She is 74 years old and has been admitted to the Guadarrama Hospital for two and a half months.
When he arrived he was not walking, half his body had been paralyzed, and now, thanks to rehabilitation, no one would say.
What bothers her the most is that she cannot see well, but just as she has started walking again, she is willing to regain maximum vision of the eye in the most lost.
Still, she makes an effort to read the children's books from the hospital library to memorize them and, when she returns home, to share them with her four-year-old grandson.
“He is tireless, he asks for a new one every night and I run out of ideas.
I don't know what to invent anymore ”.
Carmen spends the day between "the physio, therapy and a little reading."
The days in the hospitals are very long and all the patients wait for the doctors to say: "Move, exercise", "but you also have to move the neurons and reading is a way to activate them", says Dr. María Sáinz Martín , specialist in preventive medicine and public health, and founder and president of the Health Education Foundation (Fundadeps), which manages the network of libraries for patients.
He agrees with Rosa Salazar, managing director of the Guadarrama Hospital that the stay becomes exhausting and "the book is like an umbilical cord with everyday life, which helps to escape from an environment that is not the natural one for each one".
Dr. Sáinz is one of the promoters of some of those unknown hospital services, in which many do not stop to think: those dedicated to health and not to disease.
“We have been living from disease for many years, let's talk about health, about that culture for health, about the attitudes to promote it.
In this chain, the first link are parents and teachers who teach children about hygiene measures, for example ”.
The doctor says that now with the pandemic, little by little society is realizing that it has always been there.
It seems that now they make more sense than ever those
manias
of mothers and fathers with the "wash your hands before eating."
Sáinz speaks of all subjects in a transversal way, of preventive medicine, of literature, of the humanization of medicine, of dealing with the patient.
And if everything is related, in hospitals today, October 24, Libraries Day can also be celebrated.
Because when you have to stay in, you immediately find out how TV works, whether you have to buy a card and charge it, but if instead of watching TV, what you want is to read a book or a magazine, does the hospital provide them?
Ángela Pérez Encina is an inveterate reader, a user of libraries wherever she is: the municipal one in her neighborhood ―Ana María Matute―;
that of Icod de los Vinos when visiting his native Tenerife and that of the Clinical Hospital when he is admitted or if he is going to check-up.
Or simply “just because”, sometimes he just goes to return or pick up books, to see Carmen Guzmán and Marisa Guerra, those responsible and their advisers.
"Carmen is always right, I like everything she recommends," says this user.
Pérez Encina has been a patient at the Clinic since, more than 20 years ago, he suffered from breast cancer, so he did not use the library.
Some time later, he passed by her to go to a consultation and discovered her, since then she is fixed.
Once, during a small admission due to food poisoning, he asked an assistant to notify Guzmán and to bring him something to read, she did not know about the existence of the library, neither did another colleague.
They try to make themselves known with posters, with mailboxes scattered around the floors for the return of books, with brochures, in the reception guide for new admissions, but not everyone who steps into a hospital knows of its existence.
Not even now that because of the covid they have become the center of today.
Last Monday morning, Adela Fraile, a neurophysiologist at the Clinic, went to get another book store for her daughter, since the girl was born she recognizes that she reads less.
It was provided with a raffia bag to support the weight well.
She has implanted the reading virus in her service, and has infected some of her colleagues.
He was accompanied by one of his resident doctors who also took some volumes.
That is another way to publicize the library, to spread the word among patients and among professionals.
In the Guadarrama hospital the treatment with the patient is different, the stays are longer.
The relationship between professionals and admitted is slower than that existing in acute hospitals (those with emergencies and operating rooms) where the average stay is about nine days, while in those with medium stays it is between 33 and 34 journeys.
In the latter, the supervisors inform those who arrive about the services offered by the hospital, among them the books they have in the living rooms, which are freely accessible.
Libraries are surviving the pandemic despite being at the epicenter of it.
They are resistant from birth, some with more than 20 years.
Without a budget, they are nourished by donations, in some, such as the Clinic (8,000 volumes) they do have specific personnel, but in others, such as Ramón y Cajal, they depend on volunteers or Guadarrama, where an administrative assistant keeps books once or twice per week to the rooms of those who cannot go to the reading rooms.
Personnel such as Carmen Guzmán, training assistant, writer, poet, coordinator of reading clubs in her spare time and who is excited when Mateo, 20 months old, is going to return the dinosaur book that she has been
reading
while waiting in the allergy consultation, adjacent to the Clinic library.
Reading does not cause allergies or risk to health.