I never thought of going so close to death at the age of 26, but it really happened.
For months I was not well, something was wrong. The pain in my stomach was getting louder, so much to wake me up in the middle of the night.
I did not understand why it was happening and what could trigger such a strong annoyance that accompanied me for many hours during the day.
Attempts to make my doctor understand my symptoms were in vain, no particular control was prescribed to me, unfortunately.
Suffering on the one hand and my unwillingness to impose myself, to ask for other opinions have done nothing but make my situation worse.
Nine years ago, on a night of snow and frost, the unthinkable happened.
I was out with friends, as usual, when at half past two in the morning I decided with my friend to take the car and move to a nearby village to greet other friends before returning home.
As I drove carefully due to the copious falling snow, I felt bad and had to stop the car in a parking lot: I could not continue driving.
In those moments I thought I had taken cold, not having digested something I had eaten many hours ago; and this was very strange. All these thoughts came into my mind in a few tenths of a second. After throwing something out, I thought I had freed myself and the feeling of being better was real.
It was not so. It was dark, you could not see anything but something made me suspicious and even my friend, who took his phone and turned on the flashlight, to understand what the hell was on the ground.
I could not believe it, it was blood, it never happened to me, I thought. The awareness of having to do the only possible and sensible thing at that moment: go to the hospital, immediately.
I wanted to drive, but the weakness, slowly, took over.
So I left the driving of the car as I watched the snow fall, a thousand thoughts flowing, doubts and perplexities about what was happening.
Very slowly the energies were disappearing as I walked through the hospital door.
"I think I have internal hemorrhage," I told the nurse who greeted me.
I remember that they took me in two, making me sit in a room behind the acceptance, they made me undress and put me on a bed, the classic and uncomfortable hospital bed, sheets as hard as sandpaper.
Two other nurses arrived and, after asking me a few questions, they made me an annoying gastric lavage. All the activated machinery, blood pressure, heartbeat, pulse oximeter and me, helpless, I had less and less desire to think about anything: it was useless, now I could not go home normally as if nothing had happened.
I looked at the watch from time to time, and it was now four o'clock in the morning; I think that in my interior it was getting worse and worse because my brain was getting more and more confused and my attention was almost zero.
An anesthetist, very young, perhaps too much, introduced me and began to speak and speak; I understood one or two in ten words, but I understood that he was holding a consensus, I had to sign, they would have to fall asleep, totally.
In that circumstance I did not have much choice, therefore, even if with fear and reluctance I signed.
From that moment the situation, in my total unconsciousness, as I was heavily sedated, crashed dramatically in a few minutes.
From here and for a while the story is based on what was reported to me by the medical staff, by those close to me and by medical records that, inexorably, report the diary of a boy in danger of life.
While trying to diagnose my problem and proceed with the repair, in the unconsciousness of a total anesthesia I was able to try to get out of bed, snatch the tube with the probe, a tool to monitor the internal parts, until I was tied up .
Even a few words I managed to say: "I want to go home, I have to go to work".
In the exact moment when I tried to tear this black tube out of my throat, the emergency came, the real one, the one in which life can disappear in a few moments, without anyone being able to do anything in that short time available.
A lung fills with blood and gastric acid and, immediately, my ability to breathe went from 100 to 30 in a few seconds.
Result: intubated, revived until the heart starts again.
My life was practically saved, but the lung problem remained. They decided to obligatorily put me in a pharmacological coma, while a pneumonia appeared which could have been fatal within a few hours.
They did not know what to do, they advised my loved ones that the situation was very critical and that, most likely, I would not have made it to survive.
Meanwhile, in the bunker room of the resuscitation department, as in a movie in which the camera simulates the opening and closing of the eyes, my return to reality begins, to consciousness.
Simply, moderately, they gradually lowered the amount of sedation in my blood and as a result I reacted by reconnecting with the real world.
Remembering the procedures for removing the fluid from my left lung, while I was intubated, can not be recommended by anyone; the pain is very strong, but the sedation devoid of any kind of reaction, fortunately. The instinct would be to destroy anything within the range of the arms and legs as a reaction to the unacceptable pain.
The awareness comes to the surface, and I ask, by gestures, what time it was: the room was dark, without windows, no watch in the field of vision and my gestures, I was intubated, I realized that talking was not really possible.
"It's one in the morning," the nurse told me. He also told me the date, to make me understand that I had been there for more than 24 hours.
After extubation, to cry only at the thought, fortunately happened in a few seconds, and now sitting on that bed so uncomfortable, breathing independently looked up, I thought of my grandparents and said to myself: "I could not reach you now, I am too young and I have too much desire to LIVE."
