December 26th, 2013. 

 
My life stopped and I did not remove the last sheet of the calendar that year…With 30 years, a severe pneumonia, two more infections and a very short life expectancy, so I ended up that year. The only option: waiting. Wait to start a new life with a well cared lungs by all the personal health. I had to pass through the life in ICU.Shortness of breath is a distressing feeling, pain can be controled but not shortness of breath. You have to concentrate to draw strength in those harrowing moments, trying by all means to take one breath more.

40 days in an ICU in that pulse with life, a torture that intensivists and all the team tried to relief day and night on this long and thorny path. 20 days under mechanical ventilation, ringing all the time, a kind of torture… What I never imagined was that machine breathed for me.

I never understood what happened, why I could not move in that bed.I remember that nurse that even without be able drinking water, she gave water for calm my thrist, or that another one sitting in my bed, picking my hands and spoking all the nights, because only with a look she knew what I needed every moment. Or the doctor who raised the blind telling me “Look, what a wonderful day!”.

We believe that we have our life assured, until disease arrives and makes you stop in your path.
In the ICU I learned, fought and the team also fought for me. They taught me that nothing in the history has been done without illusion and hope. They taught me also that in the worst conditions is when you meet the best people. With them I learned that although everyone can not be cured, everyone can be cared.

I learned that I don´t have fear to death (although it blows behind my ears), but to suffering. But also I lost my dignity: I gave it to the doctors, patients and nurses.When the time passed…my first thought after awake in the UCI was “Well, I have got it” but a long path to live. In each heartbeat I repeated me one time and another that I was rebuilt me from my pieces and there is a point in which we only have hope, and then we discover that we have all.

In the moment that you are a disease or you are “the patient of the BOX 13”, your identity as person is out. I had the luck of knowing people that had the courage of approach to my suffering to transform it in health. I learned that there are games that we must play to the end, because battles are win or lost, but we have always to fight.

In that room I learned that the time is a thief that steals you all what you are not capable of living, many times so dead and others so necessary. In that room I understood that almost nothing sometimes is much.

December and eleven months more… Because in the second opportunity, you do not try to be so perfect. Everyone should have a second chance: for life, for love, to smile and enjoy.

Warm regards, 

Carmen Prieto Gómez

 

 

Life is made of moments and many times, 
 not losing is already winning