At the Service of the Patient, a Hero Who Does Not Serve Enemy Campaigns

Cienfuegos relies on its medical staff to overcome the pandemic situation unraveling in the province for the last few weeks, which is also one of the most complicated in the country

Author: Julio Martínez Molina | [email protected]

September 20, 2021 14:09:57

Photo: Granma

The work of the medical staff in the central province has become the work of heroes amidst the current difficulties caused by the tightening of the U.S. blockade imposed on Cuba that closes the access to medicines and equipment needed to tend medical emergencies. In moment like these, humanism lights up the genius and looks for alternative solutions to erase tiredness and solve shortages.

Those are the heroes we are talking about. Not the ones that new slandering campaigns manipulate at convenience, presenting them as “victims” or putting them at the center of fabricated protests due to the conditions in which the country handles COVID-19, and want to make them the spokespersons of their anti-Cuban campaign. The same medical staff they once called representatives of the regime and mocked because the people would applaud them from their balconies every night to express their gratitude to their work.

Our heroes, the real ones, have names and many sleepless nights on their backs. In Cienfuegos, Yoany Ojeda Treto, first and second Degree Specialist in Intensive Care and Emergencies, who has been working in the provincial hospital since 2011, have stories that are difficult to tell, that have stayed in their memory forever, like watching two siblings died side by side, facing each other, due to their disease taking a sharp turn for the worse, and been unable to do anything to help them. However, they save more people than they lose, and that is what keeps them going.

Other heroes are working in the Neonatology Ward, tending to the newborns of mothers who are positive to SARS-COV-2.

The chief of Neonatology services, Dr Anolys Piña Rodríguez, first degree specialist in Neonatology and Integral General Medicine, says that the families in Cienfuegos can trust that neonatologists do, and will do, everything in their hands to save the life of the youngest ones.

“Medical duty shifts are specially equipped and staffed to tend the birth of children from mothers who are suffering or recovering from COVID-19. The resources for this kind of care are guaranteed, even within the limitations imposed by the blockade. Very recently, we delivered by C-section, in the Center for Ambulatory Services (located next to the hospital), the children of Yunisleydis Antúnez, a 27-year-old woman who suffers from COVID-19 and from chronic high blood pressure. It was a twin pregnancy with a normal development. The result was two babies of 3,000 grams each, both in good health.”

Young doctor Sandra Sobrino Moya, resident of General Medicine and doctor of the community’s doctor office number three in Las Minas neighborhood in the 2nd Area of Cienfuegos, brings Cuban vaccine Abdala to around 20 patients.

“Due to the remoteness and their diseases, they cannot walk the distance, thus we go to their houses. We prepare the material to help those who are bed-ridden and to other people, so everybody receives their shot.”

Leanilis Rodríguez Díaz, her accompanying nurse, says that the patients are very thankful, they even cry of emotion when they receive their shot, because this is a major event in Cuba.

Her colleague, Olga María Escandón Torres, battled COVID-19, first in Venezuela and later on in in her birth province of Cienfuegos, in Cuba. “As nurses, we are prepared to handle this situation. It is true that in the face of high numbers of sick and death we can be under some stress, but we come with the mission to help save our people and the people of Cienfuegos can trust we will do so,” she concludes.

Translated by ESTI