A month ago he put his coat back on to return to the ward at Lanusei hospital, seven years after retiring from Marino in Cagliari.
Dr. Aldo Lobina, a physician and city councilor in Sinnai, recounts his experience: «It makes you younger. At 62, I completed the years of contributions needed to leave the hospital service (at the time I was at Marino), thus closing a special path of professional life. This fact left more space for other less demanding interests (but no less loved) that prevented the nostalgia of the "first love" from raging. In fact, over time, I calmly gave up job offers in various nursing homes».
Until the call (almost an appeal) arrived from the ASL of Lanusei, through the chief surgeon of the hospital?
"Responsibly, with all my baggage, together with other colleagues (luckily I'm not alone) I decided to lend a hand and prevent a large portion of our region's territory from losing an important surgical facility due to a lack of specialists. Since September of this year, for work reasons, it is no longer the Sella del Diavolo that lights up in my eyes, but the Lotzorai lagoon and the sea. Ogliastra is a wonderful place (my Ogliastra ancestors would certainly agree) for its landscapes, traditions and people". "Come to think of it - adds Dr. Lobina - this is a time when more than one health worker has been asked to stay at work, even when their time is up, and I'm sorry that the Government has tried to oppose the Sardinia Region in an attempt to prevent GPs from continuing to offer necessary assistance. Fortunately, no one has tripped me and my fellow consultants up for now from the Lanusei Hospital. Unfortunately, healthcare in our region is the target and victim of a now outdated lack of planning".
It has now been more than a month since he began resuming hospital service.
«In Lanusei I found a well-structured, clean, tidy hospital, inhabited by respectful patients and relatives. The medical staff, nurses, and collaborators are up to their tasks. In those who represent them in health and municipal institutions you see the same courtesy, a rare commodity in certain other situations. Being catapulted into the operating room of that hospital after a few hours from the start of the service gave me a singular sensation: it was as if I had never left the operating room, everything familiar, everything as before, with a mixture of amazement and surprise for myself and my new condition, a return to the recent past, which presented itself to me in its “colorful” dimension of surgical pathology. The ward has returned to being my daily life, with its rhythms and its different needs, the visit, the consultations, the dressings. Learning the names and surnames of that whole world is important and is one of my new exercises».
Another life?
"No, my life."
