Holy Mary, Mother of God pray for us sinners, now and at the hour of our death. Amen. 

My name is Kathleen Gulaga. I am 35 years old. I’m from the Philippines. I am a registered nurse, one of the frontliners who is fighting the COVID-19. 

I have 9 siblings, so we are 10 in total. I am the breadwinner of the family. It’s not my choice to be a nurse, actually. I want to be a pianist or a singer, somehow. But my family is telling ‘It’s not for us. We don’t have money to do it’. So they told me to take up nursing. 

So I’m working in the NHS, here in Royal Cornwall, NHS Trust, to be able to earn more to send back home to my family. That’s my real reason why I’m here.

I’m really workaholic. I’ll just tell you my routine. My routine is just to go to work and then I’ll go back home. I just take my shower, and just lay in my bed. And that’s it. That’s my life.

The patients who have Covid are not allowed to see their families. So you know, just thinking of… one day they just feel unwell, the ambulance came and picked them up, brought them into hospital, and then they are diagnosed to have Covid. That will be the last time they will see their families. And the patient will ask you, ‘I just want to go home. I just want to be home, just want, just send me home’. But you just can’t do anything. 

It’s hard, it’s really hard. 

Sometimes you just need to entertain them. But for me, the way I entertain my patients is just to sing with them. That’s my favourite part. I’m always singing to my patients. For example, I will raise their bed, I will just sing ‘You Raise Me Up’. And then sometimes if they will ask me ‘Hi’, and then I will just sing ‘Hello, is it me you’re looking for?’. I’m just, I’m just making fun of it. But actually they love it. And we have this patient named Pauline. So every time I saw her ‘Good morning Pauline.’ and then we will sing together, ‘Pauline, Pauline, Pauline, Pauline.’ And everyone will just laugh. It’s just really made my heart melt and just forget what they are dealing to for at least a second. 

There is one patient last Saturday night. He just knew that he had Covid. I told him when I first met him ‘Hi, my name is Kathleen. I’ll be your nurse until tomorrow morning, half past seven’. And then he started to sing the song ‘I’ll Take You Home Again Kathleen.’ 

‘I’ll take you home again Kathleen.’

Last Sunday morning, I went to him and then just told him ‘I’m leaving because my shift is over. And I just wish that you will be well and you go home soon’. And then he said ‘Do you know what? I struggled last night but you just keep me going’. And then, on my own, I just literally cried. Because I know that somehow I made something different to a person.

But I came to know yesterday that he died. You just come to realise that, oh, that’s the last time you’ve seen the person, but he actually felt how you cared for him and how you treated him so well. 

So yeah, just really… yeah. This is the life for nurse.

With this much of number of cases and number of people who died, I… sometimes you just cry on your own, and just… that I want to be… I want to, to be home. I want, I want to go home. 

What if I will get it? Am I able to see my family again? And that’s, I think that’s the most scary thing for me: not to see them again. A lot of people are telling ‘Even if life is hard, as long as you’re together, everything will get easier’. But what can we do if we are miles and miles away from home? And we don’t have means of going home?

I came from the smallest island in the Philippines. It’s called Batanes. So I’m not really a city girl, because I grew up in a province, in a small village. So yeah, I think because of that, I chose Cornwall. I live in Truro. I arrived here on September 2019. And then, because of the nature of my work, and because of the lockdown, I wasn’t able to really go out. I just went to St. Ives last Sunday, actually, that was my first time ever going out. After a year of being in here. 

I’ve seen a lot of sceneries like exactly like Batanes. And I was really excited to let my family and my friends see it and everyone is telling ‘Oh wow. This is like Batanes.’ And I said ‘Yeah, I feel like I’m home.’

I really love to be in the front line. Especially in these times, because it’s a pandemic. It will be a history. So in the next generation I wanted to tell my friends or my family that, yeah: I was there.