“It’s a beautiful and extraordinary job. I tell the guys who may be undecided about their future: being a nurse is an important but super rewarding choice, which puts you in touch with the meaning of life. And we have also seen during the pandemic such as the sacrifice of so many nurses has saved many lives “. Giacomo Poretti, a member of the ‘Aldo, Giovanni and Giacomo’ trio, spoke to Adnkronos Salute for 11 years, before becoming an actor, a nurse in the Legnano hospital. Poretti remembers the years in the ward on the occasion of World Nurse Day, which is celebrated on 12 May. “My ‘life’ as a nurse ended in 1985 but still today I feel with 2-3 colleagues at the time – continues Poretti – and we do nothing but talk about those wonderful years, we were young and very clumsy”. The experience as a nurse was reworked by the actor in a monologue for the show ‘Ask me if I’m on duty’, staged at the Teatro Oscar in Milan to launch the reopening after the long closure due to the emergency. one of the symbols of the fight against Covid. “My wife and I caught Covid in March 2020 and it was tough, we had a high fever and were very afraid that we could get worse – says the actor and director -. Then we got out of it, in those days I thought back to the years since nurses and also at the work that colleagues on the front line against the pandemic were doing. They were heroic, I know their attachment to work and the complexity of many moments that they live. Nobody pulled back “. But how was Giacomo nurse born? ? “Immediately after the military I enrolled in nursing school – replies Poretti – and from there I started. I have been in almost all departments, even in Oncology. Today the work of the nurse is very different from what I have lived between the late ’70s and early’ 80s. There is certainly more professional training, but it remains the link between the patient and the doctor. The nurse takes care of the disease ‘physically’, the patient is cared for in everything: from cleaning, dressing, feeding. And then there is a ‘medical’ part linked to the administration of the therapy and the examinations to be done “.” Even then – he remembers with a hint of irony – there was a chronic shortage of nurses, but it seems to me that nothing has changed in this, they are still chronically missing. I started as an acting nurse, a sort of apprentice. And I combined several of them – he says – once I had to give an intramuscular injection to a patient, I was afraid and I didn’t want to do it osala insisted and I did it, but it was a tragedy, I remember the needle bouncing several times on the buttock. Poor patient “. The show ‘Ask me if I’m on duty’, written and directed by Poretti, has reopened the Oscar Theater and is a hope for a restart of the theater also throughout Italy.” We must open with reduced seats and some safety measures for the spectators – warns the actor – For now we do one show a week, but there is a great desire for a recovery in the sector in October. We must be optimistic and have faith “. On the dream that the monologue ‘Ask me if I’m on duty’, and those 11 years as nurses, can end up on the big screen, Poretti does not expose himself:” I hadn’t thought about it until today, it’s not very easy but if a proposal comes, why not, it would be nice “.