This January 1, the celebration of the New Year will be double for Sergio Casinelli.
Because it will not only be sure to start optimism 2022, but to recover everything that the Covid stole in 2021. For this adoption of Madrid, the last 12 months have passed “practically blank”.
Without leaving the hospital since Christmas of 2020, he has lived 328 of the last 365 days at the UCI, fighting a disease that has threatened him several times his life.
Today, without the need for intensive care, he faces the coming months with hope.
Casinelli began to feel bad last year by these dates.
At first he thought that there were only stomach inconvenience, but immediately, the Conoravirus deployed all his tentacles over him and had to enter, before New Year’s Eve, at the University Hospital Gate of Hierro de Majadahonda (Madrid).
Saves few memories of what happened next.
She knows that she lived the 74th birthday of her -Nació on January 11- and a few more weeks in plant, “with a feeling of a lot of fatigue.”
But the 328 days he passed after in the ICU have told them.
He agrees to what the family of him explains as if he were a story, something that would have happened to another.
For him, this has been an almost erased, disappeared year, as if he had taken a Christmas jump from 2020 to that of 2021. If it were not for all the sequelae that the virus has left in his body, I could not believe what
They tell him.
Whoever leads the account of everything that has happened these months is Ana María Gabriele, the woman of Sergio and who has been by his side all this time.
She today is thrilled by remembering what happened, all the sorrows and the few joys that he has had to live this last year.
She has engraved, for example, the day they called themselves to say goodbye “because he was very bad.”
But also how was the expected announcement, just a few days ago, that finally left the ICU.
“He has always been a man with a lot of strength.
He has fought a lot to be able to leave.
Because he has spent many potholes, but all of them have managed to overcome them, “says Ana María.
The marriage arrived in Spain three years ago from Venezuela to meet with its three children, leaving behind difficult years.
“We had restaurants, we were doing well, but with the situation of the country we had to leave and malmerend the house.”
The family now lives in Villanueva de la Cañada.
Ana María goes and comes every day, by bus, from home to the hospital.
She now she can spend more time with her husband, but, for months, she could barely see it.
At this time she has gone through everything.
“If she had not even started vaccination in Spain when she entered and now she is already vaccinating the children!” He points out.
She was also sick by Covid at the past Christmas, but her recovery was much faster.
What has been surprised by Sergio is “the changed” that their granddaughters are, Andrea, Alejandra, Estefanía, Lucia and Alessandra.
Ahead, this industrial training engineer still has many months of work to be able to recover.
He continues to have respiratory problems, needs to undergo dialysis due to his kidney problems and suffered the amputation of his left hand due to alterations of coagulation derived from the infection, but he is looking forward to being able to go home.
“They tell me that little by little,” he resigns him.
“What happened with this patient has been a perseverance exercise,” says Sara Alcántara, specialist at the Intensive Medicine Service of the Hospital Gate of Hierro de Majadahonda and one of the doctors who have attended Sergio Casinelli throughout these months. “His recovery has been a multidisciplinary effort, in which intensivists have worked, anesthetists, pneumologists, physiotherapists, nurses … without that teamwork of different professionals would not have been possible to get it from the ICU,” says the specialist, Whoever remembers that the passage through an intensive care unit saves lives, but, on many occasions, takes couples and complications that lengthen over time. In the case of Sergio, the pulmonary involvement and the tremendous loss of muscle mass that he has suffered, they are complicating the ability of him to breathe autonomously. In addition, at the time he has been admitted, he has also suffered repetition infections, some serious, and have worsened the kidney problems that he had previously suffered before the VOCID arrived at him.
Sergio is recovering in the hospital, but the ideal, points out his doctor, is that there were units of chronicles, support networks, where this type of patient could continue their assistance.
“The patient needs respiratory support that he and the family of him needs to learn to manage.
These patients can not go home without further, they need assistance.
That is doing it right now, but it should not be like that.
The system is designed for the attention of acute problems.
It is the great pending subject, “he claims.
Next to her husband’s bed in the hospital center, Ana María Gabriele can not contain “the joy of being able to have it closely longer».
The situation remains complicated and she is a lot ahead to be able to return home, she recognizes her.
But this new year will be very different.
«Much happier».
