They disembarked in the morning of April 8, their suitcase in hand, in the huge hall of the Henri-Mondor hospital, in Créteil (Val-de-Marne). In this AP-HP establishment, renowned for its neurology and neurosurgery department, a new resuscitation building was opened in disaster, five months ahead of schedule, to accommodate patients heavily affected by the new coronavirus.
Steven Roux, Jonathan Marion and their friend Garance, came from Rennes to lend a hand for a month as nurses. Graduates, all three are in training at the University Hospital of Rennes (Ille-et-Vilaine) to specialize in resuscitation.
This morning in early April, nearly 29,000 people are still hospitalized in France, the deaths are already in the thousands, and Ile-de-France is suffocating under the weight of its density. "Martin Hirsch unwittingly welcomed us", have fun Steven and Jonathan. "He came up to us, his face masked, and asked us if we recognized him. Then he put a little note, nice, to tell the teams that outside people were coming to help, not to hinder them in their work but to help them. The "benevolent" tone was given.
The building still smells of paint
A fixed-term contract for one month is in fact 145 monthly hours spread over three weeks, and paid 21 euros gross per hour. The pace is intense: two nights on call, two days of rest, during which you have to revise your lessons and prepare your dissertation. And once more. At the Ibis hotel, 10 minutes by taxi, there are around thirty carers from all over France: students from Montpellier (Hérault), contract carers in their region of origin, others usually working for boxes service providers in the medical field…
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The building still smells of paint when they start, and the carts are not ready. Whatever, "the ten beds were quickly filled," says Steven. “Gradually, they opened all the floors. In all, we had fifteen to twenty different patients ”. Among them, three died, four were able to be transferred to other services, proof of an improvement, the others are still there.
Did they come from abroad? Were they firefighters, cashiers, garbage collectors, deliverers, trades essential to the smooth running of a confined country? Steven doesn't know; the lives of these patients in a coma, without families to tell them, remained unknown to him. "The common factor that I noticed in almost all of them is a certain obesity," notes the caregiver.
"Taken up by the lack of equipment"
From 7 p.m. to 7 a.m., gestures are linked. "There is all the toilet care to be done, the manipulations to avoid bedsores, the checking of infusions, because the bags are emptying quickly, the dialysis care", enumerates the young man who worked in pairs with a nursing assistant or a nurse. "Initially, each pair had two patients, then with the reinforcements, we went to an average of one to two," adds Jonathan.
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"When we arrived, I panicked a little: the condition of the patients was really alarming," says Steven. Then an increasing number could be released from the respirator. “When we learned when we arrived in the evening that a patient had been extubated, we really had the banana. It kept us going and kept us motivated. I would not have given up, but humanly, it was easier to live with. ”
If Steven focused on everyday life, excluding the medical or political debates that were played outside, Jonathan was "uplifted by the lack of equipment". "We arrived in the service after seeing on TV that it was there, the masks and over-blouses had arrived, and we were told to pay attention to the quantities". "Everything that has been said for years about the public hospital ...," he continues. As soon as we arrived at the HR department, a girl was on the verge of tears because she couldn't find accommodation; the health managers, who run the services, were even more exhausted. In our teachers, there were only women, working at night, teaching their children at home after four hours of sleep, and I did not hear a single word louder than the other. Only advice, kindness. Frankly, they are champions! ", He salutes.
Steven returned this Thursday, April 30, after his last call. Jonathan was him back in Rennes the day before: "I am happy to find my home but I have the impression of abandoning the teams a bit". He says he may have to go back in June, and he will be voluntary.
And don't tell him about the health reserve
Doctor Anthony Valor does not believe in a second wave, but he will return there if necessary, too. A liberal sports doctor in Lyon, he spent two weeks in a geriatric clinic in Seine-Saint-Denis. “On the day of the confinement, the departmental order asked us to close the cabinet. We first went to lend a hand to the emergency doctors at a clinic in Lyon with which we work. ”
The clinic belongs to the Ramsay group, which also manages the Bois d'Amour clinic in Aulnay-sous-Bois. His director asks him to come. Seine-Saint-Denis is then in the spotlight, more than elsewhere the victims fall. “I have two young children, my wife runs a micro-crèche, so I thought about it a bit. And then it's a clinic specializing in geriatrics and oncology, I wasn't sure I had the skills. ” Monday at noon, however, he arrives at Aulnay. "The atmosphere was a bit surreal, with replacements not very motivated". The director, three of the six geriatricians and the cook are sick from Covid.
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Out of the fifteen patients entrusted to him, ten are infected. They are between 80 and 100 years old, not all of them are bad, but care must be taken to stabilize their condition with very few staff. “The first week, we had a lot of trouble filling out the schedules; the exhausted director of care was arrested; there was no nurse on the floors, that means no captain at the helm to manage the ships. ”
And don't tell him about the health reserve. “Some have taken pride in the number of registrants, but frankly! When we called, they told us ah are you in geriatrics? We want to go to sheave! I would like them to take advantage of their free time to reread the Hippocratic Oath, that would be it! He annoys himself.
If the experience was "beautiful", it was also more tiring than expected. "I have had a lot of pumping since my return," he admits. Doctor Valor resumed his consultations at the office on Monday, two days a week. And "as I am a doctor at the fire department, we started the Ehpad tour to take the samples". Until May 11 with "a little apprehension".