The 335th Night of Memory - 9

Health Defenders

Sepideh Kholoosian
Translated by M. B. Khoshnevisan

2022-11-1

The 335^th program of the Night of Memory was held in the Sooreh Hall of the Art Center on Thursday 5^th of Khordad 1401 (May 26, 2022) attended by the physicians and the staff of the health defenders and hosted by Davood Slaehi. The families of the martyrs of health defenders, the medical health staff and a number of volunteers in the area of health were present in the ceremony, talking about the memoirs of the breakout and ascension of the corona pandemic.

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Dr. Seyed Poujia Shojaei, an ICU specialist and a faculty member of Shahid Beheshti University, working at Imam Hossein Hospital, was the ninth narrator of the Night of Memory show. After thanking the treatment and health services staff, he said: Our treatment center received many patients from the very first day, and over time, the care and treatment departments expanded so much that the work was extended to setting up several conex boxes in the courtyard. In the infectious ward, we prepared about 40 emergency ICU beds and this number kept increasing.

During the Corona days, we witnessed strange events. One day, when I came out of the main ICU ward, one of the patients told me that a man was sleeping there. I went and saw that he could not get up. He said that my son is sick and is being cared for in one of the normal wards of the hospital. He has corona, but they said that we don't have an empty bed. In fact, we had about 60 or 70 patients, all of whom were hospitalized, and discharging them was like a crisis situation, and we had to manage how to send them to the ward so that we could admit more critical patients.

That gentleman said: I have just one son. Either come and visit him yourself or ask them to bring him here. With the same clothes, we went up in the elevator and I saw his son. The young man was about thirty or thirty-one years old and very polite. He told me that he was breathing hard. I talked to him and said: Breathe with this machine till I transfer you to the special ward. We had to be careful not to transfer stress to him. They took him away, but his condition was slowly getting worse. At night, the postdoc fellows called and said that his condition has worsened and we have to insert a tube for him. Intubation was done for him and he went under the machine. In corona, if the pressure was positive under the machine, the lungs might burst or get a pneumothorax or lung rupture. We had to put tubes in them and many of them got emphysema. The same thing happened to this boy. I have a habit of joking with patients. That is, I do not pay attention that the patient's level of consciousness is 3 or 5, or he or she is completely unconscious or not. I talk to him or her in any situation. In the same way, I talked and joked with him every morning. He also had a special name that I called him by another name. He reached to the point where his body suffered from emphysema[1]. His father was very worried when he heard this. I told him: Life is not at our disposal; rather, it is God’s. Anyway, after a while, this patient woke up and over time they removed him from the machine and he was discharged from the ICU ward. This incident happened during the delta wave.

During the Omicron days, that is, just recently, one morning a gentleman who was twice my size came to see me. They said to me: Come and see who has come! When I was told his name I saw that he was the same young man. When I saw him, he was telling me some memories that were very interesting to me. He said: I was waiting for you to come in the morning. At nights when I had been sleeping under the ventilator with the tubes connected to me, I woke up every day with a lab needle. Those were terrible moments. At night, when the alarms of the machines rang - the hospital staff know that if the oxygen levels are low, all the ventilators would start ringing - I thought I was dying, but in the mornings, when you came and talked to me, I was waiting for another day to begin. With these words, the fatigue really left my body.