Elisabeth Roca, 51, had a near-death experience. She was in the ICU, after the operation and the restaurant episode. She saw a light, but not at the end of a tunnel, like in the movies. Her light was on the surface of a lake or sea in which she was sinking. When I get to the bottom, I’ll push myself up with my feet, she thought. “Oh, sorry!” She said afterwards, not knowing to whom. Her legs did not respond to him.
But the hands do. He catapulted with them and came out. She breathed again, opened her eyes, and found herself surrounded by doctors. A few days earlier, on August 13, Beth, as everyone calls her, went to a restaurant with her partner, Carles Mota, 67. When they finished, she couldn’t get up. “I can not feel my legs”. An ambulance, doctors, the Mútua de Terrassa. A smoker since she was young, Beth had an invisible enemy: lung cancer.
Tomás and Valentín teach Beth how to move from the bed to the chair
Invisible and traitor. The metastasis had undermined it without making a sound. Normally, it would have spread to the bronchi, but it affected her spine. That’s why she didn’t discover that she couldn’t get up until the enemy showed her face at last. She had to be operated on urgently. In addition to imposing radiotherapy and immunotherapy sessions on her, her cancer caused her paraplegia. “You will never walk again,” they told him.
She began cancer treatment at the Hospital de Barcelona, from where she was referred for neurorehabilitation to the Institut Guttmann, in Badalona. She arrived exhausted. Her fever and extreme weakness prevented her from continuing the sessions. She was an ideal candidate for the home rehabilitation program that this leading institution in the treatment of spinal cord injuries has implemented with such success.
Beth’s home neurorehabilitation
Beth lives on the ground floor in Terrassa, in a house that she and Carles have adapted to their needs. The dining room is presided over by an articulated bed, a wheelchair and the corset that is placed to support her back when she sits down. To endure the pain, she has a morphine patch, which she renews every three days. Today, as she expects a special visitor, she also has a fentanyl lollipop, a powerful pain reliever.
Wearing the brace and doing the exercises is an ordeal for someone with a colostomy, but nothing can make her smile. What is your secret? “I will not run a marathon. I’ve never done. But I will walk again ”, she affirms convinced. She already moves the toe of her right foot a little bit. When the miracle happened, the physiotherapist Valentín Foulquier could not help crying. Valentin is one of the members of the rehabilitation team.
Noah’s drawing
The others are the nurse Mireia Navarro and the occupational therapist Tomás Rodríguez. What is the secret of this home so happy and so punished by adversity?, he wonders The vanguard while attending the work of these three professionals. The scene is also watched by Beth’s partner. President for 21 years of the club Jàbac TerrassaCarles Mota is quite a celebrity in the world of grassroots football.
They met years ago, there, at the club. Two castaways. Carles had survived the premature death of his wife, a victim of breast cancer at the age of 37; Beth, to a stormy parting. Together they have five children and five grandchildren. In the fridge, next to the open kitchen and the dining room with the articulated bed, there is a drawing of one of the youngest of the family, Noa. She has painted Beth standing, walking again.
Athletes with spinal cord injuries, at the Guttmann Institute
Carles’s world collapsed every weekend. From Monday to Friday he ran a textile company with 80 employees. His work and his children, who lost his mother at the ages of 9 and 14, kept him in constant motion. But then came Saturday and Sunday. And everything stopped. Everything was falling apart. That is why he took refuge in youth football. Two of Beth’s children, the youngest and the oldest, also played in Jàbac…
Both are extremely proud of their respective children, both male and female. For the three of her, Carles is Carles; and for his two children and five grandchildren, Beth is Beth. Everyone loves each other without the need for labels or to replace or impersonate anyone. The reader will think that this second blow will knock down Carles, who had already suffered another blow, but he has become Beth’s shadow and is a rock of optimism.
He has retired, but in addition to football he had a thousand obligations. “Dad, you take care of her. We take care of everything else, ”his sons tell him. And that’s what he does. Beth, who is writing a book about her experience, is gorgeous. With a swollen belly, yes. And with a morphine patch and pain that a healthy person couldn’t and wouldn’t want to imagine, but gorgeous. Every time her eyes meet, they smile like two teenagers.
The secret has been there, in plain sight from the beginning. Since Valentín Foulquier, Mireia Navarro and Tomás Rodríguez arrived to teach Beth how to fight atrophy, how to heal wounds, how to go from a wheelchair to bed, how to empty the urine bag or how to improve her day-to-day . But there is something that not even they can teach you. To want more than she already wants a man as in love with her as the first day.
