In my village, the Hospital was towering and from it you could see the entire village.

My grandparents' house was and is in Bairro Alto. Whenever a siren was heard, the entire village would rush up the neighborhood, towards the hospital. We climbed the granite hill, between the slabs, and awaited the arrival of the ambulance. I remember the “loaf bread” and the “toad mouth”.

The full-breasted firefighters, proud of the gravity of the moment, carried the sick into the emergency room. Popular people speculated about the who, how and why, waiting for the first firefighter to leave to confide in the details of the occurrence.

“It's just this one”, “Poor wife and children”, “Doctor X is here today”, “If Doctor Y were here”. It was an urgent call. Doctors, nurses and assistants came from other hospital services and, so often, from their daily routines.

The Hospital had both an inpatient and an outpatient clinic. Women's ward with 16 beds in, as they say now, open space, complemented by two private single rooms. Parity for Men's Infirmary. Another operating room with six surgical beds divided by two rooms. Six beds for postpartum women. All on the first floor.

On the ground floor, the sick were waiting to be taken care of and the relatives noisily waited for the file to come up at the time of the visit. It was on this floor that the warehouse/pharmacy was located, the doctors' offices, the dressing room, the x-ray, the huge sterilization vat, the naphtha heating. In a separate building was the laundry and in another the morgue. In the mornings, from the administrative services, you could hear the unmistakable Olga Cardoso… the Sala and the suitcase game. From the delivery room came the hysterical pregnant women and, finally, the newborn's first cry.

The assistants asked for the ADSE number or the Box number, even long after the boxes had disappeared and the SNS was already a certainty. Statistics were chopsticks deserving a dash every ten. In dead times, gauze was folded and compresses were made. Everywhere the smell of ether reigned, nauseating to visitors, imperceptible to those who made that space their life.

I was born in this Public Hospital. Years before, it was managed by the local Misericórdia, being “nationalized” during the post-revolution period. I no longer belong to the time of the nuns/managers/"nurses", the internship regime for auxiliary staff, the patients classified as pensioners, porters or indigents, the income of doctors dependent on paying patients.

Two years later, it was integrated into the National Health Service Hospital, assuming its universalist character. The doctor who assisted my birth was doing the medical service in the periphery. My parents chose him as my godfather at baptism. I know that many of my deskmates were born there. There we said goodbye to my grandmother. Joys and many tears. It was our Hospital, it was part of our singular and collective life.

Don't be fooled by the romantic description. We lived in a very different and much poorer Portugal. I don't know how many people worked there – they were certainly insufficient and with wages arriving late, through retroactives that hardly kept up with inflation and double-digit interest rates. The sick and their families supplemented the professionals' wages with potatoes, chickens, cabbage and other organic farming goods.

Since then, the Public Hospital has changed a lot. It accompanied and supported the development of our country. It has changed so much and offers much more. However, it is further away from people. Farther and less committed to each and for each one. It has nothing to do with the old hospital in my village, now a city.

Nowadays, we face new difficulties and live many other dilemmas. Sometimes, it seems to me that we forget the path, exacerbate the difficulties of the present and abandon the future. I don't know how or at what point in time many of us stopped believing...

It is at this defining moment that, despite all the difficulties, it is necessary to understand that the fruit of our work is essential for everyone. After all this way, it's not time to put down your arms and give up on tomorrow.

In the old hospital in my village, everyone ran uphill. Health professionals knew they were essential, the population knew they depended on them. Genuinely. They generously wanted to treat and care for those who needed them because they were a common whole.

The Public Hospital is not a building, a stewardship, or a service. It is a generous idea for an inclusive and fairer society.

The Public Hospital belongs to all of us.
The Public Hospital is us.

The article can be read at the Public Hospital of September 2018.