PEDRO SIMÓN
Madrid
PHOTO: SERGIO GONZÁLEZ VALERO
Tuesday, April 7, 2020 - 01:23
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- Resistance. The Gaul of Teruel that resists the coronavirus: "We took measures a week before"
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When he was awakened from sedation after eight days, Tomás Cano was still intubated.
Remember what you thought: "I was delusional and thought I was being shot in the middle of a gunfight."
Remember what he saw: "I didn't understand anything, I saw people with tubes in their mouths left and right."
Remember what you heard: «That man [the head of the ICU] smiled at me and shouted at me: 'Tomás, cough, cough, cough, cough!' ».
Remember what he felt: "I didn't understand what the hell they wanted me to wake up for, if they were shooting me."
In the video he is seen convulsing with his lost gaze. All clustered around him. Waiting. The tube is removed very slowly . It is not pleasant to see. And they wait again. When they see that he is taking air, when they see that he is loading his lungs like the one that inflates a mat, just at that moment, the health personnel start clapping.
-Tomás, cough, cough, cough, cough!
Just like when co-pilot Luis Moya said to Carlos Sáinz: by God, he tries to start it.
And the man starts.
But Tomás is in Medellín.
-Did you know what was happening?
-No, no, for me it was still in the middle of a shooting of Colombians.
Then his coughing started. The first extubated by the coronavirus pandemic at Hospital La Zarzuela began to cough. And that cof-cof-these days- is the closest thing to the cry of a child who comes into the world.
(...)
The sound of life [coughs as he speaks] comes to us from his home in Vallecas, Madrid.
He returned there this Wednesday, April 1. But it was another Tomás. From the first symptoms began until I went through the door again, 22 days had passed; he had been hospitalized for 17 days and another eight days sedated and intubated; he had slept 12 days in two different ICUs ; and he had even developed a new fear: the fear of falling asleep.
When they told me they were taking me to the ICU, I shit in fear
Tomás Cano, extubado released-Why?
-Because after entering I could hardly even breathe, my bronchial tubes blew, I drowned and thought that, if I fell asleep, at worst I would no longer wake up.
But it dawns, that is not little.
But a lot.
After losing 10 kilos and escaping from Pablo Escobar, Tomás Cano - who always had his candles blown on his birthday - returned home very weak after having turned 42 on March 19 without knowing anything: sedated , with an endotracheal tube connected to a mechanical ventilation machine and on the verge of death.
At first it was a lifelong thermometer that read 38.4.
The evolution of the disease was the usual until the sixth day, after a night of cold sweats, he passed out on the bed when leaving the bathroom . That image.
The next image is that of the same day: an ambulance that takes you to the hospital through empty streets.
The next is the one in a room on the third floor where - still - only he is.
The following is that of a patient who does not improve despite treatment.
Everything very fast.
And then there is that previous instant when the protagonist does not know how his own movie will end.
« When they told me they were going to take me to the ICU, I shit in fear. I knew what it meant . They took me down. At the entrance to the ICU, the doctor looked at me and said: 'You won't need this here, Tomás'. And they took away my mobile. Then they took off my socks, put me on a green robe, a mask I had to breathe through. But since I couldn't do it, I tried to rip it off once. Then another ... ».
"If you continue like this we will have to tie you," he heard.
The last thing Tomás remembers is his threat of ripping off his mask for the third time.
And then a tunnel in there.
The eight days that Tomás was without being told by his wife Montse , who received a call from the doctors every day, only one ( one call was a good sign, they told him; if there are two it will be worse ) and that he had to count a milonga for the two children.
“They [eight and 16 years old] did not understand how they could no longer talk to their father on the mobile. I had to invent something to avoid telling them the reality: I told them that it had been removed to disinfect it well ... They were days of anguished uncertainty ».
He turned off the TV, turned away from the radio, left the news websites, broke or broke it, he says. He chose the Orfidal because all they offered him was bad shit.
Until the Colombians came, of course.
Tomás, cough, cough, cough, cough!
The Colombian who shouts at his face is a Spanish doctor from the ICU. A doctor who watches you like an entomologist and who seems "very happy" with what he is seeing.
Little by little I was landing. They said to me: 'Tomás, touch your mask'. And I was touching my ear ».
The man makes cof-cof. Go smile at the doctor. You have had a 42-year-old newborn.
(...)
Tomás Cano spent two more days "too conscious" in that first ICU. «To my right I saw a woman die; To my left I heard: 'Damn it, we're going to do a tracheostomy!' ».
He was then transferred to another second Intensive Care Unit for another two nights. Ahead is an intubated patient. On one side, a man with a tube over his head. That sees. He is the only conscious one. Until a doctor decides he has seen enough.
Everything is weird now. I can't even hug my children until they do another test
Tomás had a hard time leaving.
«I was on the floor but the pot was still going away. My wife called me and said: 'Even the Pope has called you.' And I am very serious: 'Yes, yes, I have spoken to the Vatican so they are careful.'
The rest can understand it.
It is April 1 and he has just returned home. But it is another Tomás. From the first symptoms began until the door has passed through again, 22 days and 500 nights have passed.
-Everything is weird.
-Why?
-Because I can't kiss my children. Because I can't do it until some time has passed and they give me the last test.
-Tell me a great thing you did today, something you thought you were not going to do more.
-Take a Coca Cola. It's scary ...
Thomas coughs.
"One with olives," he adds.
Then we hear him laugh. And that ha-ha is the closest thing (as Jesús Montiel said) to a father whose children give birth.
According to the criteria of The Trust Project
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