After two years of pandemic, doctors outline plans and change lifestyle

With the decrease in the number of patients and hospitalized for Covid-19 in the state of São Paulo compared to the peaks of the pandemic, doctors are managing to make room on the agenda to put new plans into practice, resume canceled vacations and enjoy the family.

In 2020, the days of doctor Maria Goretti Sales Maciel, 61, director of the Palliative Care Service at the Hospital do Servidor Público Estadual, were full of hours of work, stress, tension and emotional distress.

The 30 hours a week turned into more than ten hours of work a day. Breaks were rare. “The feeling I have today is that I lived ten years in two”, summarizes the specialist.

To make up for the lack of beds at the height of the pandemic, patients in palliative care were assisted at home. She and the team were torn between home care, a Covid palliative care ward at the hospital, and the task of phoning families to report on the health status of patients.

“It was what consumed us the most. Every day, each one of the team called ten different families. We took on a great deal of suffering. We had a lot of bad news to share. , reports.

The idea of ​​changing the lifestyle was matured in July 2020, when Sales stayed at home for ten days with Covid. She took a course entitled “Living outside the System” and began her studies on permaculture — a system of building sustainable environments based on natural ecosystems.

In January 2021, Sales bought a farm in Extrema (MG) and, nine months later, started building a house there. In between, he studied agroforestry. “On weekends, I started camping at the site and studying how to transform it into a forest, preserve the spring, plant food. That is my goal. I am planning to radically change my life”, he says.

Retirement, scheduled for after the age of 70, will be brought forward. The 30 hours a week of work became a reality in the doctor’s life this year, but divided into three days.

“Our time may be shorter than we imagine. I saw people die unexpectedly, who were healthy, caught the virus and left. We come into contact with human vulnerability, which has a lot to do with our way of life . We could have a lifestyle more compatible with the future”, he says.

For Daniela de Oliveira, psychologist and member of the Habit Change and Lifestyle Medicine Program at Hospital das Clínicas da USP, the pandemic put everyone close to death, and especially doctors faced finitude very abruptly.

“Everyone gave up very important things. Being too much at the service of others and too little of themselves can cause burnout, she says, referring to the physical and mental exhaustion so talked about in the pandemic. That’s why she advises that now is the time to put the new plans into practice and take care of the lifestyle with healthy eating, rest and stress management with meditation and psychotherapy.

“It is the rescue of life. Doctors must practice what they defend so much”, says Oliveira.

Cycling against stress

Hematologist Maria do Carmo Favarin, 45, has worked double shifts in recent years. During the pandemic, medicine occupied about 12 hours a day with activities divided between Grupo Sabin, where she is the manager, Unimed’s private practice and hospital, all in Ribeirão Preto (313 km from São Paulo).

“The pandemic has greatly increased the demand for laboratory diagnosis. And because patients hospitalized with Covid showed many changes in the blood count, as a doctor I also frequented the hospital a lot”, he reports.

Mother of two girls, currently aged 10 and 13, Favarin also had to manage her daughters’ remote classes. “I had to manage the children at home and someone to look after them. The youngest did not use the computer”, says the doctor.

The escape valve from the moments of exhaustion was the bicycle. The pedaling, incorporated into the stressful routine, brought new perspectives and other plans.

In April of this year, Favarin joined a group of cyclists for a bike ride between Holland and Germany. It was six days cycling with rest stops. The group hired a company to take the bags from one city to another. From Cologne, Germany, Favarin returned to Amsterdam by train and took a plane to Brazil.

“It was a recycling of energy. My work pace continues to accelerate, but the stress, tension and emotional burden caused by Covid-19 have diminished”, he says.

Learning and new plan

It was during the pandemic that neurosurgeon Wanderley Cerqueira de Lima, 66, came up with the idea of ​​writing two books on neuroscience, one for the general public and the other for health professionals.

In parallel with medicine, he cultivates a taste for writing, ease of communication and an interest in spreading knowledge — currently through articles shared with colleagues in the profession or publications on social networks.

“At Covid, we doctors knew almost nothing. I had to do an immersion in virology, and I saw that I had to talk to people using a more colloquial language”, says the doctor, who works in a private office and in the ICUs of the Albert Einstein hospital and the D’Or Network.

During the pandemic, office demand dropped by 40% and elective surgeries had been cancelled, but the frequency of work in ICUs increased.

“I didn’t suffer as much as the front-line people. My shifts were always in the rear, but there was a higher incidence of brain injuries to be evaluated”, reports the doctor.

The emotional charge was also stronger. “We treat the patient and the family. This moved me. I reflected at the same time that I needed to help.”

With the resumption of the old routine, the doctor intends to gather the notes he keeps in notebooks to start the production of the works — still without publication date.

Meeting with granddaughter

In the life of Jamal Suleiman, 62, an infectious disease specialist at the Instituto de Infectologia Emílio Ribas, the challenge of facing a pandemic coincided with the birth of his first granddaughter, Sofia, in February 2020.

He and his wife Grace, who is also an infectious disease specialist, saw the baby born, but had to give up living with the girl for almost five months. The grandparents were looking at her from afar, from the gate of the building.

“I think it was one of the great challenges, being the first granddaughter, of my oldest daughter, in a pregnancy and in a very smooth delivery. We had to move away because knowledge at that moment was precarious. We knew how Covid transmission was. , but not how the evolution of the disease would be”, he recalls.

After the five months, the grandparents and Sofia were able to meet, but with physical distance and mask. Picking her up was not yet possible.

“My daughter’s first mother’s day was virtual, nothing different from what we told people to do, but difficult. All the 2020 parties were from a distance. I saw my mother only in 2021, but with distance”, he says.

At the height of the pandemic, Suleiman left at 6 am with an outfit inside the car because he didn’t know if he would return home. In addition to the excessive hours of work at the hospital, he took on a demand as a spokesperson for the press, not to mention the household chores and grocery shopping that were left to him and Grace.

At that moment, the couple had to reorganize their lives.

For the infectologist, the current epidemiological scenario allows him to live in a more comfortable situation with his granddaughter. “One of the things I like the most is staying with my granddaughter. Today, I can pick her up, stay with her on the weekend at my house, take her to a square, in the park”, he says.

“The other day I caught myself thinking: I have a story to tell. At Covid, what’s the story? It’s this girl who represented the recovery, a breath of life.”