The doctor who writes to remember her deceased patients

BarcelonaShe had been writing fiction for some time for her own personal use. However, the shock of the pandemic led family doctor Alba Martínez to seek in writing a way to "find emotional closure," to say goodbye to those she knew. patients who died from COVID-19She had known them for years and had shared medical diagnoses, medication plans, and also confidences about how things were going at home, with her husband, her wife, her children. Until the virus took them suddenly, and in many cases, "when it wasn't their time."

She confesses that she's embarrassed to show her writing, which, she says, has turned out "a little sad." The pandemic disrupted life across the globe and hit primary care clinics like a bombshell, where professionals like Martínez, accustomed to "accompanying people through death," were overwhelmed by so many unexpected passings. "Sometimes you found out people had died after they were already dead, or you were there for the death of people you didn't know. Everything was much colder than before, and I thought it would be good for me to write about those who were no longer here," she explains. He has written about twenty stories, and in almost all of them he has taken the liberty of introducing a fictional element to fill in some gaps in the deceased's personal life, besides changing the names to avoid identification. "I've never shown any of the writings to the relatives, although perhaps some would be pleased or would say to me: 'Hey, my father or mother weren't like that.'"»"," he admits.

Text by text, the life snippets of Mercè, Lola, or Narciso serve to talk about aging, about the unwanted loneliness "There's a lot," she laments. memory, fragility, or family tiesReading the stories also reveals the close relationship primary care physicians maintain with their patients, treating them in the office and also addressing any obstacles to home visits. Like Lola, an elderly woman who complained about everything, dependent on a husband who had widowed her and with no desire to ever leave the house again.

The familiarity of home

During her visits to the patient's home, Martínez's image of her as a bitter woman changed. Over coffee, sitting on the dining room sofa, she discovered "another Lola," who, more comfortable than in the clinic, opened up, reminiscing about anecdotes from the family's arrival in Barcelona or how she... "And each visit has a therapeutic effect. When I leave, Lola feels better, she's less ailing for a few days," writes Dr. Martínez in the text titled with the name of the woman, who died of COVID. "Not having known her would be terrible. Truly terrible. And I wouldn't know it. On top of that, I wouldn't know it," the text concludes.

Martínez finds inspiration in a recounted anecdote, a gesture, or something else that reminds her of the deceased patient. "I write in a completely anarchic way, because I pick up a pen and I don't know what I'm going to write, and sometimes I just go off on a tangent," she says, laughing, while reviewing texts in the library of the Catalan Society of Family and Community Medicine (CAMFiC), an organization of which she is an active member.

In the story The batMartínez recreates the story of Mrs. Feliciana, who kept the cigarette butts her late husband had left in an ashtray before he died. They were still there three decades later because the widow didn't want to get rid of them. "She thought, 'It's a memento of my husband, and I'm not going to throw that away until I die.'"»"Incidentally, the woman had survived in post-war Barcelona by engaging in black marketeering, and when night fell she "spread her wings in the darkness" of the Raval—hence the nickname—to help the "widows of the Reds" survive."

Social Information

During home visits, a closer and more intimate relationship develops between the patient and the professional, who gains a more complete picture by observing the color of the curtains, family photos, or the age of the furniture. Patients talk about a little bit of everything—"about their children and especially their grandchildren"—and they also like to make it clear that they, too, were once children or young adults without ailments or health problems. "They want you to get an idea of how genuine they are," the doctor points out, emphasizing that there, in the dining room, there is information "that doesn't appear in the medical records" and that helps to understand "what's happening to the person." Death, a presence in consultations, is something natural for Martínez, who believes that, despite this contact, professionals also need to "grieve" when they lose a patient and, in their own way, let it go.