Luis Domínguez, “if our car could speak” or a heartfelt story of a nurse at Cudeca

News 17 Jan 2022

Luis Domínguez, “if our car could speak” or a heartfelt story of a nurse at Cudeca

Luis Domínguez, “if our car could speak” or a heartfelt story of a nurse at Cudeca

My name is José Luís Domínguez, Luís to patients, relatives and colleagues, and I am a nurse.

I landed in the heart of the CUDECA family one warm month of July to form part of the first nursing team that started out in the current Hospitalisation Unit. When the Unit celebrates its birthday, the colleagues who are still left from that "batch" (Benito, Alicia, Juan, Rocío and the one who speaks to you) also celebrate their birthdays. This year we will be 16 years in CUDECA. In 2006 I became part of the home care teams to assist patients and their families at home, where I continue to this day.

After having been assisting patients and families in practically all the areas of the province, I currently attend together with my colleague Maribel Carrasco, team doctor, the area comprising Benalmádena, Fuengirola and Mijas Pueblo; together we travel around the area with our "portable office" trying to bring patients and families the best possible care in their homes.

If our car could speak, it would surely be able to give testimony of all that we have lived during all these years; because the car has been and is an improvised office, but it is also a garden sown with tears or sunflowers or light depending on the harvest, a mute witness of hopes and lives closed with harmony, a place of meditation and meditation, an improvised training room with students from different disciplines and colleagues in rotation, a confessional welcoming unconfessable confessions, about life, about death, about hope? above all, about hope... because we rebel against "there is nothing to do"... because there is always something that can be done... because, sometimes, it is enough just to "be" for things to start flowing again. Everything will be fine...

To say that our work makes us feel good, that it makes us feel better people, may sound trite, but the truth "only has one side", as they would say in some of the corners we often visit. The feeling of being useful in such an important and transcendental moment in the life of a person and their families is priceless; the feeling of being a support or simply a companion on a long road ahead is also priceless, a prize that we do not seek but which we receive with deep gratitude.

All of us who are part of the home care teams keep in a little corner, where our most precious treasures live, memories of all kinds with patients and families: emotional, sad, happy, and even comical. Situations such as the one we experienced with a patient we have been seeing at home for some time. He usually receives us with his wife and daughter. The visits are sometimes endless, because he often tells us many stories about when he was a child. He is funny and talkative. Sometimes he calls me Mohammed and we laugh. There is an explanation for this: on our first visit he was a bit reluctant to be attended by us and I even told him: "if you don't call us, we'll call you, if Mohammed doesn't go to the mountain...". These are stories that teach you, that tan you and would take many pages and many hours, because they are memories that have been gradually chiselling our soul and have been embedded in it.

Ask our car. Maybe he can tell you more stories.