to come. They cut the dead skin with a pair of scissors, by the edge. They put on some very cold ointment which felt as if I was touching paradise. They cut my panties, I got a probe for the pee and a line on my arm, I was covered with a sheet and I was told to call my parents and tell them that they could now come and see me. “What a fucking hell I have just created for them”, I thought. “I’m fine”, I said on the phone. My mother said that, at first, when the nurse called them, she thought she was dreaming. My dad had spent the time walking up and down the corridor and she had ironed all the clothes from the washing machine. When they arrived, my dad was grey and my mother looked as if she had a knot in the stomach. I kept saying I was fine. I was taken to the last empty room in the ICU: the number thirteen. Nothing more appropriate to celebrate the terrific night of Halloween, wrapped as a mummy. I still had the time to smile in my brain, which was already turning off, and I fell asleep. November I spent one week in the ICU, three weeks in the Unit of Minor Burnts and, when I was nearly going to be discharged, the unit collapsed and I was taken to the Trauma Unit. I was finally sent home. It didn’t take longer than one month and one week. But it felt eternal. Some people had to stay for more than one year at hospital. How is it possible to put up with such a long time in there? I couldn’t help it but think of the “bubble kids”, protected and at the same time trapped inside their artificial uterus. I thought of the inmates, isolated from the world by walls, corridors and bars. How do they avoid becoming crazy? And the patients in a psychiatric, how do they survive to what they have around? They must be really strong. And believe that the best medicine, that one which can really save you, is yourself. The worst thing was not being able to move. I spent the first three weeks in horizontal position, immobile like an Egyptian queen in her sarcophagus. What do you do when life tells you to stay still forever? You can only move in your insides, to become the astronaut of your own universe. What do you do when you loose an organ of your body or when you break down, like the car toys the day after Christmas, and you cannot move the way you used to? The hospital seemed a different world. To start with, there were no beautiful colours. To continue, the words were very strange and flew on top of my head just as alien UFOs. At first, I couldn’t understand what the white coats were telling me about. The “stitches”, for example, were literally tiny stitches that were used to join the graft with the open wound. The “steak” was the frozen blood you were injected if you had hemorrhage. It looked like meat in a vacuum packet. And the clip that they put on my finger to measure the beats of my heart was called “pulsi”, poor little thing. Being connected to cables, tubes and bags, made me feel a bit like a lab cyborg. All the machines that were around me were extensions of my own body. In order to drink, as I couldn’t really sit up, I had to use a straw. Straws were beautiful because they had colourful strips and if I closed my eyes while I drank, they would take me far away, on a boat or in the middle of a deserted beach, and the water turned into lemonade or orxata (tiger nut’s milk) or into milkshake or fruit juice. To drink using a straw was nearly magic. At hospital, I stopped thinking. Brain: zero point five, just the minimum. I could only feel, sleep, eat, drink and ask for the bedpan when I needed it. Every day was a transfer of the day before. I was bored. I looked out of the window from my bed, but I couldn’t see a thing: the green top of some trees and the yellow helmets of the workmen when they walked towards the scaffoldings, and that’s it. I would have liked to see the faces of the workmen and say hello. I would have liked them to smile to me. If the top of the trees moved, or were touched by the rain or the wind, it was quite an event.
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