“A cerebral stroke changed our lives.
It was just before the Christmas of 2016. When we arrived at St Pau’s Hospital, Cris was gravely ill. She had a life or death operation and suffered very high intracranial pressure for several days: the anguish we felt was indescribable.
When finally her condition stabilized and the effects of the sedatives wore off, she did not wake up. We questioned whether she would ever wake up, and if she did, how far she would be able to reach in her recuperation. On every visit the doctor made our hearts skip a beat.
When finally she began to react, the first thing she did was to tap on my hand to respond to the questions I asked her: one tap for yes, two for no. One day when she was by then able to move her right arm and leg, she took hold of my hand, brought it to her lips and appeared as if she was giving me a kiss. I told this to the doctor in the semi-critical unit: “She doesn’t do that to me!”, he replied. We laughed about it. Her recovery was beginning.
For more than a year, we relied on the support of the medical team, the therapists, the nursing team and their aides, first in the Santa Creu and St Pau’s Hospital and later in the Guttmann Institute. We felt marvellously well looked after. We have told everybody that here we have an extraordinary public health service and that we must fight to keep it. And we have shared, as far as we can, what we lived through during those many hospital hours.
Now we want to present the book which brings together Cris’s experiences, from coming out of the coma to her continuing rehabilitation, with the doctors and friends who helped us to cross the Riera”. Julià Guillamón
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