Madrid (AFP)

They drag an oxygen cylinder, onto the conveyor belt.

Far from the hopes of an end to the pandemic thanks to vaccines, Covid patients continue to fight in a Madrid hospital to recover a body that is still escaping them.

She pulls herself up painfully from her chair to the parallel bars.

Clings to it, feverishly.

And slowly moves his foot, in a monumental effort.

The exhaustion can be read in the weariness of the gaze of Carolina Gallardo, 51, admitted the day before in a post-Covid 19 rehabilitation service.

"I do not walk alone. Besides, I did not know if I could get up," she told AFP.

I don't control my hands.

Look at my hair, I can't even tie it up on my own. "

In a soft, encouraging voice, the physiotherapist places her hands on her waist, asks her to place her weight on one foot, then on the other.

This rehabilitation service - located in the heart of the "pandemic hospital" Isabel Zendal in Madrid, a gigantic public complex built in three months - opened a few weeks ago.

There is a treadmill, exercise bikes, exercise balls, and a ramp.

Wooden cubes, and a mirror too.

It treats the "sequelae of the coronavirus, especially motor, as well as respiratory" of patients with severe forms and who have lost their "motor capacity to the point that catching a spoon or opening a bottle" is impossible, explains José Lopez Araujo. doctor of physical medicine and rehabilitation.

- "Miraculous" -

Electrodes, pulsometer on the index finger: when the body no longer reacts, we stimulate it, we measure it.

Carolina's has come a long way.

Of the intensive care unit of which she has only a very vague memory and approximate dates.

"I think I'm a miracle. I shouldn't have made it."

She barely manages to remember her slow return to the world of speaking people.

"I couldn't speak. I couldn't close my mouth. A physiotherapist worked the stretch in my mouth, she said showing her lips, so I could close my mouth. I spoke very badly, I didn't couldn't hear my voice. And then I started to hear it and now I'm talking, "she articulates softly.

"It's a devastating disease," she says in a whisper as a transparent tube connects her nostrils to an oxygen cylinder.

Even the smallest message sent to the brain can go unanswered, without any reaction from the body.

Jesus Nogales, 68, can attest to this.

In intensive care for "a month and so" he was "unconscious, sedated, I didn't know anything. For me, the world did not exist. I was in a deep sleep".

- "As soft as a custard" -

When he wakes up, he learns that his wife, with whom he shared 51 years of his life, succumbed to the Covid: "Since February 27, she has been underground".

Sorrow devastates him and his body no longer responds.

He says he was "as soft as a blank. I had no strength, no strength. I had to relearn to walk, to eat, and to move."

"I remember I was given a solid meal to eat. It was rice and when I took a bite I thought the rice was raw because I had no strength in it. jawbone, ”he says.

Since then, Jesus has found the energy to eat and relishes, rebellious, to be able to name all the dishes whose smell and taste he could distinguish, he who could have drunk "a glass of bleach" at the beginning of the illness without realizing anything.

Today he dreams that his "lungs are pumping up again. I wouldn't want to see myself in a wheelchair."

On the wall of the service, a poster with a quote from the movie Rocky was pasted: "When you want to hold on to the end, if you manage not to give up when you feel that you are cracking, that's what makes it all. the difference in a lifetime ".

© 2021 AFP