Scientific and technological advances of our era and the excellent training received in Medical Schools lost much of their value when they are applied without adequate sensitivity, when it´s forgotten something so elemental as the right of human beings already evicted to die surrounded by their loved ones, in a suitable place. In this moment, their bodies should be received by the family with the necessary respect and seclusion.

The twenty minutes that I lived beside the corpse of my mother in the ICU were grotesque: her body destroyed and my infinite sorrow were exposed shamelessly to the apathy of who were by there.

I understand that healtcare professionals will experience in their profession some hardening of the character. Sinking with each death would not be supportable and would undermine their professional worth. However, I think is callable that they should act always without forgetting that the patient 000764 is someone really essential in the life of a reduced number of people. All those days mothers died, but mine just died one time… It should be assessed not only what is being done, but also how it is made.

I do not accept the scrupulous respect to established protocols as an excuse. If they are like that, they are poorly designed or they are incomplete. They work in the technical part and fail badly in the human one. We have been contacted by writing with the head of the ICU where my mother died and no one has responded to us.

Our intention is to avoid other people go through the same never more.

The fact of nobody has responded to our troubles after three months, has made us think one more time in the superb of some doctors and perhaps that superb is one of the obstacles that avoids that Health system would be more human in our country. I am a teacher and also many of my colleagues suffer from this vice… I usually speak of  this with my students of 2 ° of Secondary School before delivering them to the University.

I commented to Gabi that some of the students who will study Medicine already suffer of superb in early stadiums.  This can be observed in Secondary School. They are smarter than the rest. Usually they do everything well, have excellent behaviour and receive honors constantly at home and in the school. Fighthing obstacles that come after increase that feeling: the high school excellent to reach the grades, the super-demanding Faculty of Medicine, the fellowship competition… And there are the grandmothers putting their eyes in white and boasting of grandson, the neighbouring proud and sometimes jealous and the submission of patients that put their lives in their hands; the economic and social position…

Once they have reached a position of power in a hospital, who is capable of making understand to my old bright students that perhaps are doing something wrong?. How someone so perfect is going to do something bad, someone that always do everything well?.

For sure that for the responsible of the ICU where my mother died,  our regrets could seem an excess of sensitivity and perhaps would not like our objections. I repeat that there is no a superior intelligence to mine that can convince me that I am  wrong: some aspects of the Organization of your ICU should be rethought to make it not only efficient but also human.

By Pascual Gallego (pascugallego@yahoo.es)