ROME (AP) – The pandemic has created unprecedented challenges for families around the world managing their work and private lives.
For the Di Giacobbe family, juggling is even more difficult as mom and dad 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 give their children.
The family is celebrating Christmas together this year – parents Maurizio Di Giacobbe and Glenda Grossi managed to both get off December 25. 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 Tiziano, 4, Arianna, 9, and Flavio, 10.
When the pandemic first broke out in Italy last spring and no one knew how to limit its spread, the parents wore surgical masks around the children and developed a “virtual hug” to express their love. It was a game for the children. But their parents knew firsthand how deadly COVID-19 was.
“I’m not saying we were used to watching people die, but we went to work with a kind of resignation” that at best they could give their patients dignity in their last moments, Di Giacobbe said.
Over time, doctors found out which therapies worked better. “Now we are fighting,” he said.
Still, Italy now leads Europe with the most COVID-19 deaths – more than 65,000.
In many ways, the couple brings the love of a family to the COVID-19 ward because they know well the importance of touching, caressing and video calling with their patients’ loved ones outside, who are otherwise not allowed to visit.
Grossi cries as she remembers one of her first patients at the Tor Vergata COVID hospital in Rome, Fabio, a 43-year-old father of three who married his partner in March while he was hospitalized with COVID-19.
“I remember that day when Fabio made the video call with his wife and kids, he touched his chest with his hand and said, ‘They have to intubate me, I’ll see you soon.’” While Di Giaccobe sits next to her, Grossi’s voice crackles .
“‘See you soon’ unfortunately never came true, because Fabio did not make it.”
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Nicole Winfield contributed.