Javi is a great intensivist. In size and in person. He is a good friend and awesome intensivist.


Javi´s mother dies in the icu box. Both of them know, look at their eyes and know it. They try to comfort each other, they speak in whispers, they know that they have a few words that say and few looks to share. The days go by and her condition gets worse. Little should be explained to an intensivist from these processes, so he makes a decision: gives discharge in ICU and transferred her mother to conventional hospital room. There, relatives say goodbye to her, tell her how good mother, sister and wife who has been, they torn off  smiles, comfort her with words of encouragement while slowly shuts.

That afternoon Javi comes back to the unit, the reddened eyes speak of the outcome, and hug us one by one, whole, large. Hurt by the loss, happy because he has shared with his mother the last days, latest confidences, last looks, last care.
Come to my memory the words of the Brazilian poet Fabrício Carpinejar:
“My friend Joseph Klein accompanied his father to their last minutes. In the hospital, the nurse did maneuver to move the bed to the stretcher, trying to change sheets when Joe shouted from his seat: let me help you. He gathered forces and took first his father on his lap. He laid down the face of his father against his chest. He accommodated on his shoulders to his father consumed by cancer: small, wrinkled, fragile, trembling. He was embracing his father for a long time, equivalent to his childhood time, equivalent to his adolescence, a good time, an endless time. Rocking his father from one side to the other. Stroking his father. Calm the his father. And he said in a low voice: I’m here, I’m here, Dad! What a parent wants to hear at the end of his life is that your child is there.” (“All pai e filho da morte de seu pai” version to the Spanish Zorelly Pedroza).

Let go, accompanying. I can not define it better. Certainly we are nurses who more receptive are in the limitation of the therapeutic effort, and to family members to share the last moments with the patient, as Joe did with his father in the poem of Carpinejar.

As Javi did with her mother.

As I hope that someday my son do with me. Because the only thing I want to hear at the end of my life is that my son is there.


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Consorcio Hospitalario Provincial de Castellón