Today it’s cloudy, with a few timid rays of sun appearing from time to time, and it’s windy – unpleasantly windy, as if to tell everyone “stay at home”. A strange silence I could not. In the late morning I had to pass by the office to get some documents that I could not print at home. As I drove there, I found there were more people on the streets than I had anticipated. Don’t mistake me: the city …
Tag: hospital
Six am and the alarm clock rings. It’s been some time since I’m awake. Today my son Afonso is being operated on and we have to be at the hospital for check in at 7.30. I get up and do my ten-minute morning meditation. Need it more than ever. When it is over, I am calmer, I have a feeling all will go well. I get dressed and when I’m having breakfast, I hear someone coming out of his …
It had been a stormy day, with havoc all over – flight and train cancellations, rain, wind…as in the previous days. I thought the rugby match of last Friday night would be cancelled – if not for other reasons, because the green grass field would have turned into mud; but no, it was on, and my son Afonso left for the club with his usual long, confident, strides, the exhilaration of the forthcoming game all around him like a magnetic …
The neurosurgeon disinfects his gloved hands as he prepares for the surgical procedure. He has done this so many times – he has operated on countless patients, seen this scenario so many times before him. The team – his team – all dressed in green, the patient in deep slumber lying on the operating table; the preparation, and then the first cut and all he concentrates on is his purpose, his superior purpose of helping God make someone, who is …
The hospital emergency is packed. The old patriarch is lying on a bed in a corridor turned into an improvised ward. Most of the patients are elderly people like him. This winter has been harsh, very cold and now rainy and damp, and flu quickly turns into pneumonia…and then the whole bloody list of diseases that came with old age goes crazy: his diabetes, his heart condition…damn old age, he thinks and he closes his eyes and tries to remember happier …
