My dear friends:

This week I’d like to share with you the summary of a story wrote some time ago by Pilar Sordo, a psychologist well-known in Chile.

“I see a wonderful family worry about the hairstyle of her mother who is in a deep coma, to make her look beautiful at the time of her departure.


I see people recover, with smiles and hope as if they had lived a nightmare which many memories are erased with time.

I see tubes, mechanical ventilators, many machines, remedies and probes by heaps for different purposes which I’m beginning to understand a bit.

I see and talk with many people who have loved unconscious, talk to them, play them convinced and in my view rightly perceived love, if indeed the soul has never been sick.

I look at nurses, auxiliary toiletries, food, doctors, nurses giving mood even though sometimes there is not much hope.

Receptionist, receiving all day the anguish of all those who are there and who must also recognise that we provide them with treatment and care that they deserve.

“You ask from where I speak, I do it from the ICU, which is called Intensive Care Unit but I have observed during these days inside clearly it should be called Unit of Unconditional Love.”

In antiquity the chosen names marked people about the meaning of this, today we have the possibility of “re – christen us” and make “critical” an instance of “Unconditional love”.





Verónica Rojas