"These will clearly be hellish days for you…”. This is what Alessandro, a patient I took in a wheelchair to get a chest x-ray at the Covid-19 emergency room next to the ER, said to me this morning.It is true, for almost 10 days we have been caring for patients in a field hospital set up, where traditional organizational aspects are missing and the discomfort of our patients is tangible. We have encountered anxiety, fear, verbal aggression, search for answers that cannot (yet) be given. And we, on the front line, find ourselves unprotected, as if disarmed in front of this new frontier of care and, to our own efforts, we add those of others, in a heap that threatens to crush us.

I, with my "painful" and imperfect humanity, am offloading upon myself the dynamics amongst my colleagues and their closure, an unimaginable organizational pressure, the distortion of situations, together with patients waiting for answers and treatment: I sink.
In these days, what is emerging in me is that Covid-19 becomes a magnifying glass that makes me see what I am missing: I see all my physical and human limits and I wonder where that new creature, generated by Baptism, is.

Read also – “What sustains me, even in quarantine”

"What does baptism imply? You begin to understand it in a living Christian companionship, since in this companionship a memory is aroused that gives peace to the heart, satisfaction to the soul, and, at the same time, makes life combative, makes you realize that life is a battle for affirming Christ”. This passage from Generating Traces in the History of the World, the book by Fr. Giussani that we are reading during School of Community, gives ultimate meaning to all that I am living and all that that still has to come.

Luisa, Italy#Coronavirus