Nurse comforts Covid-19 patients with ‘Hand Of God’

The coronavirus pandemic has brought with it a whole lot of challenges. The world wears face masks daily, many have lost their jobs, adapted to working from home, the entertainment industry is in tatters and people across the world are dying. The worst part is that patients are isolated in hospital and aren’t given the opportunity to see their family and friends as a result of the infectious nature of the virus. So, a nurse in Brazil got creative in the hopes of giving her patients something close to the human contact they desperately crave.

In a bid to bring some comfort to her patients, a nurse cleverly filled up two rubber surgical gloves with warm water which allows her patients to both get the illusion of holding someone’s hand and helps with their blood circulation at the same time.

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Semei Araújo Cunha, the nurse stationed at the Vilo Prado Emergency Care Centre Unit in Sao Paolo, says that she wanted to bring some comfort to the patients who are battling the virus.

"All for the sake of affection, comfort and care for the patient, it is not enough to be professional, you have to be empathetic human, letting the heart speak is good," she says. "As we had an intubated patient, we decided to do it as a form of affection, stroking, humanizing, as if someone was taking her hand, and also to soften the extremities that were very cold, the hand was very cold".

Semei admits that she picked up the idea from fellow nurse Lidiane Melo, who works in Rio de Janeiro. In an interview, Melo admits that she was inspired to help a patient after seeing the effects the virus was having both on his body and mind.

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"His hand was very cold. I wrapped it in orthopaedic cotton and bandage, which is a practice foreseen in nursing, but it did not work,” she said in an interview with local media. "Circulation did not improve. I thought about wetting his hand with warm water, but because of the risk of contamination, the idea was not a good one.”

She adds "I thought a little more and put the warm water inside the surgical gloves and wrapped it in his hand. I made this glove with hot water to improve my patient's perfusion and see saturation better, and I hope he feels that someone is holding his hand."

Image courtesy: Twitter