Attached to a toy hammer. Accompanied by his guardian angel, his mother. And with an innocent gaze fixed on the television; they’re showing ‘La que se avecina’, and that provokes the only smiles that light up his house. «Let’s get handsome, Adri. They’re going to take pictures of you and we’re at the age to get married. Isn’t it? », Ana whispers to her son Adrián. He, who shyly watches the movement in the room from his chair, smiles again. That simple gesture is something that was not part of the family’s plans not long ago.
Almost a thousand days ago – September 22, 2019 – that
Adrian Martinez his life is over. At least as we all know it. A motorcycle accident at a roundabout in Puerto Lumbreras caused severe diffuse axonal head trauma 2 and left him with acquired brain damage. Her doctors gave her little hope of life. Today, almost three years after that afternoon, Adrián and his parents fight tirelessly to at least hear again the voice of that boy who died when he was just 17 years old.
It was after 7:30 p.m. that day when Ana and Javier’s phone rang desperately. She was a friend of her son and what they are going to hear will never come out of her mind: «Adrián has had an accident. He is lying on the ground and does not move ». Those were the words that broke the heart, still unrepaired, of both. It was a day like any other in which Adrián took his dirt bike to go out with his friends. But a strong collision with a vehicle meant that he never made it to the appointment. The boy’s head ended up hitting the road and the curb of the roundabout.
The subsequent moments make Ana’s skin bristle, she can’t hold back her tears, and Javier’s. “When we arrived they wouldn’t let us touch it. There was a person who should have known medicine that he had to treat him before the emergencies arrived and prevented him from drowning in his own blood. We have not seen him since and we would love to thank him for saving his life.”
a new blow
From that moment, the ICU became the house of terror for Adrián and his parents for almost a month. Going down to the floor, life hit them again. A sepsis caused by an IV caused him fevers of more than 40 degrees and shot his heart rate to 250 per minute. Adrián returned to the ICU to fight again to stay in this world. And, as he has been doing for almost three years, he won again.
From there he went to the Santa Lucía hospital, and months later the fight continued 631 kilometers from home: at the Guttmann hospital in Barcelona. There he “he only received half an hour of physio a day”, the treatment that Social Security paid for. Paying for other care out of pocket was unimaginable for a humble family from Fuente Álamo who had left their home and their other son alone on the other side of the country. She had to go home, but then they had to face another enemy: the Covid. The pandemic deprived him of being treated at Santa Lucía. The hard work began for Ana and Javier in a home that was preparing to embrace another Adrián.
return your smile
Already at home another stage began to find what one day he lost. Ana and Javier searched even in the most remote places for neurorehabilitation clinics and therapies that would bring happiness to an orphaned house of hers. First it was Murcia. Later, Yecla, which involved three hours of travel per day. And, finally, Cartagena, where speech therapists, physios and therapists improve Adrián’s life every day.
But that’s just the tip of the iceberg. “In the afternoons another physio comes to the house. Every month and a half we visit an osteopath in Seville, and on Fridays we go to Alicante for neural therapy », he says. But all this would be useless if the parents had not found in Madrid what they were about to try one day in Mexico: a stem cell treatment. “It’s what works best for him. In two months he is able to get up with help, he has started to moan, turns his head and smiles, things that he did not do before », his parents reveal.
Ana had a photography studio where images are no longer captured or the flash is seen. She stopped doing what she liked to dedicate herself to who she loves: her son. Javier works in the transport sector and paralyzed his work for a while. The pension they receive does not reach one thousand euros, a figure far from the cost of private treatments, medicines and other necessities. For this reason, Ana immersed herself in social networks some time ago to sell items and hold bingos and raffles in search of an economic break for a suffocated family. “We look for life as we can,” they add.
Ana rides her son Adrián on a stationary bike in the garage of her house in Las Palas. /
Friends forever
Adrián is still attentive to the conversation. His gaze grabs you and doesn’t let go. His smile ‘dries’ his mother’s tears. “Shall we go to a party and have a gin and tonic?” Jokes his father. The young man turns his head and laughs. He sits up, but his laugh doesn’t sound. What you do hear suddenly is the doorbell. It is Paloma, a friend who comes to play with him. His people are still there, hooked on Adrián before and now. A “family boy, who lived by and for motorcycles” and who today continue to be his greatest encouragement. “When he hears the motor outside, he automatically turns his head. I said that a motorcycle would never set foot in my house again. I never wanted to see one again. But smile. It makes him happy, and that gives me the life that they stole from me”, acknowledges Ana.
In a house where the walls are ‘painted’ by photographs of the family, one stands out above the rest. An image captured two months before that indelible day. In front of a cake, crowned by two candles one and seven, Adrián blows to end the flames while he makes a wish. An illusion that he surely still keeps hidden inside, in silence, in the hope of being able to fulfill. Like Ana, her mother, who yearns for nothing other than the same thing she sighed for when her son was born for the first time: «If he spoke again, this pain would be less strong. I need to hear his voice again. I dream of hearing him say ‘mama’.”
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