ROME (AP) – The pandemic has posed unprecedented challenges for families around the world who manage work and family life.
For the Di Giacobbe family, juggling is even more complicated, as the mother and father are intensive care nurses at the same COVID-19 hospital. They spend their days trying to provide their patients with the kind of personal care and attention they provide to their children.
The family will celebrate Christmas together this year: parents Maurizio Di Giacobbe and Glenda Grossi got both to receive on December 25th. But they won’t have grandparents, aunts and uncles around their holiday table. They want to protect them.
“So we’ll be with our three kids, the dog and the two cats,” Grossi said on a rare Saturday when both parents were home at the same time, decorating the Christmas tree with Titian, 4, Arianna, 9 and Flavio, 10.
When the pandemic first broke out in Italy last spring and no one knew how to mitigate its spread, parents put on surgical masks around the children and developed a “virtual hug” to express their love. For the kids, it was a game. But his parents knew firsthand how deadly COVID-19 was.
“I don’t mean that we got used to seeing people die, but we were going to work with a kind of feeling of resignation” that, at most, could provide their patients with dignity in their final moments, Di Giacobbe said.
Over time, doctors discovered which therapies worked best. “Now, instead, we’re struggling,” he said.
However, Italy now leads Europe with more deaths from COVID-19, more than 65,000.
In many ways, the couple brings the love of a family to the COVID-19 room, knowing full well the importance of touches, caresses and video calls with loved ones of their patients abroad, to whom they are prohibits the visit.
Grossi is exhausted when he remembers one of his first patients at COVID Hospital in Tor Vergata in Rome, Fabio, a 43-year-old father of three who married his partner in March while hospitalized with COVID-19.
“I remember that day when Fabio made the video call to his wife and children, he touched his chest with his hand and said,‘ They have to intubate me, we’ll see you soon. ’While Di Giaccobe s’ sit next to him, Grossi’s voice cracks.
“” Until soon “it never came true unfortunately, because Fabio didn’t get it.”
___
Nicole Winfield contributed.