A precious moment in the life of a much-loved man was captured on the Ryan Tubridy Show as Ryan read out an email from a recently bereaved listener. Anita Glynn got in touch to publicly thank the Ambulance Service members who looked after her father with such tenderness as he was moved, very ill with Covid-19, from a care home to Blanchardstown Hospital. Ryan read the email aloud in full, in which Anita describes a scene now familiar to many families:
"We arrived at the back door of the home a few minutes before the transfer took place and Dad was being looked after by two beautiful, compassionate giants of men who were minding him with the gentle love of nature's carers."
Anita says the family hadn't seen her Dad in person since the end of March, and this was now the beginning of May. She describes how family members tried to comfort her Dad from a distance:
"We were probably incoherent with grief, trying to tell Dad and let him know we were there; shouting to him from the mandated distance. Telling him we loved him and telling him we would see him at the hospital and he was in good hands."
The kindness and empathy of the ambulance workers struck Anita forcefully, even as she was gripped with fear about her Dad's health and distraught at the physical distance between them at such a vulnerable moment:
"Dad raised his head to look at us, and we tell ourselves he knew us, that he knew we were there with him. And I remember looking at the faces of these men and their grief and their heartbreak: it was palpable."
Anita describes the men as they were doing their job: transferring a sick patient from a care home to an acute hospital. But she says they were doing so much more, because they felt so much more:
"These men, lifting him and touching him gently, rubbing his hand through their gloves and their gowns."
Once her dad was admitted to Blanchardstown Hospital, Anita says she encountered more frontline staff; giving their all to their patients, even in the face of personal grief:
"A young shattered doctor came to speak to us and during our chat she told us her own uncle had died that morning; from Covid. How does a person keep going after that personal grief? But she did."
Anita's father died on May 2nd and she wanted to express her gratitude for the care he received:
"He was 85 years old and adored. A dad, a grandad, great-grandad, father-in-law, brother, godfather, uncle. I want to let those ambulance men know that we will never, never forget them. And I hope they're OK; that they look after themselves, that families like us love them for what they do."
If members of the Ambulance Service happen to end up on a future episode of The Late Late Show, Anita says she has a message for them that she'd like Ryan to pass on:
"Please, please, could you tell them that we remember. And we care. And we thank you, from the bottom of our hearts. This is my family story of Covid, but we are just one of over 1,700 families. So thank you for the platform and thank you for allowing me to speak to the living, personified kindness that we live among. To the awesome people in our National Ambulance Service."
You can hear Ryan reading from Anita's email by clicking the arrow on the picture above. You can also listen back to Ryan's interview from the 19th of August with Richard Quinlan of the National Ambulance Service here.
Ruth Kennedy