Fernando and his second home

Mr. Fernando lives with three other companions at Pousadinha, one of the buildings that used to be part of the former Colónia Rovisco Pais Hospital (HCRP), where he now receives all the care provided by the Center for Rehabilitation Medicine in the Centro Region. We went to meet him in one of his favorite activities – listening to the radio. He welcomed us with the usual friendliness, a characteristic confirmed by those who deprive him daily. We immediately realized that he has an active listening that he certainly learned after losing his vision. He answered us assertively to all questions, with well-measured words, chained in a simple speech and as serene as it reveals the wisdom of a life sculpted by a journey that is already eighty-eight years old, sixty of which linked to the Hospital na Tocha.

Born in 1932, he lived with his parents and siblings in a small village near Almoster (Alvaiázere municipality) when he was observed by the HCRP medical brigade. One of his brothers was one of the first patients to be admitted to the Hospital, in 1947. In the village, he did not have many conditions because his parents “were poor”. They lived “a long time” but the father, “also with the disease, was never admitted to the hospital”.

The first symptoms appeared when Fernando was seventeen years old, and according to the first clinical record, dated 1950, they were manifested mainly by repeated epistaxis and nasal obstruction. The identification of his father and brothers as Hansen’s patients ended up including him in the regular monitoring that the brigades did to their area of residence. In these consultations, analyzes were also collected, and medicines were provided.

Despite this follow-up, at the age of twenty-one, he was recruited and spent three months in the cavalry in Torres Novas, as the military inspection doctor did not believe him when Fernando spoke of his illness. At that time, he remembers taking pictures for the first time. Then the case was clarified and he returned to his homeland.

Six years later, the medical records of the HCRP reported that Fernando had infiltrations on his face, spots on his thighs and the results of the analysis left no room for doubt – he was developing the most severe form of leprosy. He was admitted at the age of twenty-seven, on January 28, 1958. Mr. Fernando recalls that, at that time: “I felt nothing. But analyzes were positive and brought here. (…) I had already come here once… I came alone, they picked me up in the car, in an ambulance. When I arrived here I was seen by a nurse and they installed me in Hall 8, where I stayed for nineteen years.” The parents “never came to visit me, I was the one who went to land to visit them… I went two or three times. It was good to see the family again. But at the beginning I was almost three years without getting a license. Then they gave him a 30-day one!”

After all these years, he makes a positive balance, and tells us: “no one came with the desire to be hospitalized!” But “I did a lot of analysis, worked… And so, time passed and I got used to it, in such a way that they were already a second family …”

Mr. Fernando confesses to having good memories of the employees: “We had good doctors – Dr. Nelson, Dr. Barbosa, Dr. Pedro, who was director” and recalled, still with an expression of longing, “Dr. Hernani, who died of disaster, but was playful with me! He said that I needed a diet of roasted cod with vegetables and wine, which was what he ate there at his house, in Minho – he was from Ponte da Barca! ”Keeps memories of Nurse Eduardo da Costa Pirré and recalls that “the sisters were good to us”.

He confided in us that he got along well with everyone, but he says, with sadness, that some employees treated them with “a certain difference” and believes that this was due to the fact that they feared to lose “the contagion risk subsidy…” And he adds “but they didn’t treat us badly… And everything changed when they cut their allowance in Lisbon. There, the dressings were already done without gloves! ”

From the time when HCRP was still a village, he misses “the whole environment, the youth, the camaraderie…” At that time he worked as a shoemaker – “he made shoes for the inmates. There were twenty-one shoemakers! And then I walked in the paintings and worked in the pantry in the pavilion. We were useful and we were enough. Everyone worked! (…) At that time everything was taken care of, dawn, and everything had beautiful flower beds.”

In leisure time, he recalls the “cinema sessions twice a week – on Thursdays and Sundays, in summer, and once a year, the feast in the chapel – of the Sacred Heart of Jesus.”

We learned that he was a sacristan and in that role he worked with Father José Martins Vaz. From the prayer space, he told us that the Chapel had “a wing for women, another for men and at the front, it was for health workers”. And he remembered with longing the annual pilgrimages that they made to Fatima.

Mr. Fernando said with pride: “I never ran away from the Hospital, but there were colleagues who ran away because they didn’t like being here… They missed their family…”

When the rules started to be less tight, and, as he says “with the April 25, 1974 jokes, it started to be said that this would end. And we were afraid that they would close here and take us to the Recovery Center in Tábua. I believed, I was wrong and I left with discharge. I started having consultations every three months”.

Before going to his homeland, he married a patient who was also at the HCRP and Mr. Fernando told how it all happened: “She asked me to get married. She was from Mira, wanted to leave the hospital but was abandoned by her family, who did not want her there … She also believed that this was going to end. The wedding was handled with the help of a nurse, Father Afonso and Father Amando da Tocha and we were married in the Church of the Tocha before going to my homeland ”. There was no wedding dress or photographs. And when they were doing the paperwork “we found out that it had a different name. In here it was Rosa, but in the civil registry it was Maria dos Anjos. I don’t know what these mistakes were like, but there were many cases of these. ”

Rosa, passed away about four years ago and when we asked her if she was beautiful, Mr. Fernando replied: “She was perfect”. We got along very well… the problem was poor health! ” And she added that when they went to Almoster, Dona Maria do Carmo, Mr. Fernando’s mother, reacted badly because “she didn’t want any woman there” so “I made a little house at the end of the yard to live away from my parents. We lived there eight years. (…) At the beginning with a pension of three contos and three hundred. (…) We cultivated some land and worked in agriculture on behalf of others as well”.

“Health was lacking” and on February 6, 1989, Mr. Fernando was readmitted to the Hospital due to a medical complication – an “eye disorder” as a result of which he lost his sight. He says that, at the time, “almost two hundred were still here” ex-patients and he sadly repeats the regret of leaving the hospital in 1977, saying: “But I did a poor job! I made a mistake, if I knew, let me be. Instead of being here, which was fine … I am sorry to have left the hospital. And there was a doctor who told me that I should not be far away with this disease, I should be accompanied in hospital…. ”

And when we ask what he thought might have been different, if he had stayed, he replies immediately: They gave me work again! But they said they were going to close, I was wrong! I did badly… ”

Today, he regrets having lost “his eyesight and strength in his legs …” but he gives thanks because “I am still here and some, younger, have already left!”

(Text based on oral testimony, in 2020, validated by the interviewee. Interview and writing by Cristina Nogueira – CulturAge)