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Several weeks ago, doctors from the Central Institute of Hematology and Blood Transfusion based in Hanoi were deployed in order to assist their colleagues in the south. Among them were female doctors and nurses who said farewell to their relatives as they departed to join frontline forces in various COVID-19 hotspots without knowing exactly when they would be returning home.
Chu Thi Hong Anh, a nurse at the Department of Stem Cell Transplantation, lives with her husband and their small baby. She recalls that she received great support from her husband before volunteering to head south.
“When I told my husband, he supported the idea and assured me that he would try his best to take care of the baby at home,” Anh says, “That helped ease my worry at first.”
Upon arriving in Ho Chi Minh City, the country’s largest COVID-19 hotspot, Anh and her colleagues were plunged into a real COVID-19 war, with shifts taking place around the clock and requiring intense work. Donning personal protective clothes, they worked continuously in an intensive care unit (ICU) hospital for seven hours at a time every day without meals or any water.
“On the first day, I was a bit nervous but then quickly kept up with the tempo. Despite its hard work, the most important thing is to save patients’ lives,” says nurse Pham Thu Hien of the Department of Stem Cell Transplantation.
Hien recalls that she was saddened when many critically-ill patients went on to die due to the virus. Each day she received young patients and pregnant women whose courage to battle against COVID-19 serves to motivate her and other healthcare workers to strive hard to ultimately beat the virus.
“I saw with my own eyes a number of sensational stories in which a doctor failed to save his mother’s life from COVID-19, or a male doctor died of COVID-19 during his treatment alongside his wife, another doctor,” says Hien, “If you ask whether I experience any emotions, I must say it is really immeasurable.”
Many severely-ill patients were relying on mechanical ventilation to help them to breath and were only able to stay in one place. They did not have any family members, but medical staff were close at hand to both encourage and take care of them. Even when the patients were close to death, it was up to the doctors and nurses to see them off on the last road to their permanent resting place.
On the bright side, the efforts put in by local healthcare workers was rewarded when seeing their patients recovering each day. Many critically-ill patients responded fairly well to treatment and were later discharged from ICUs to other departments in order to receive normal treatment.
“For me, the most emotional moment was watching a pregnant woman at 25 weeks rely on mechanical ventilation. This patient then recovered and was transferred to another ward for normal treatment,” said Anh, sharing her emotions of the event.
With the latest outbreak in Ho Chi Minh City now showing signs of abating, volunteer doctors are returning to the north in order to resume their normal life and work.
“We are confident that the prolonged COVID-19 outbreak will come to an end soon, but we are ready to take on a new mission away whenever we are requested,” says Anh.
