What’s Wrong With Her?

On dodgy knees, second chances, and life-altering experiences

Yesterday morning, I walked to the Venice Ospedale of S.S. Giovanni e Paolo to book a couple of long-overdue examinations—namely, an x-ray and a physiatrist appointment. Both revolve around the state of my knees, as their delicate build and temperamental inclination have recently been put to the test by my decision to embrace long-distance hiking. Honestly, it was only a matter of time before they’d start aching for real; they have never been prime nor have they ever pretended otherwise.

I remember noticing their first signs of dodginess in my early twenties, specifically anytime I’d walk around in a pair of flat-soled sneakers and especially in my favourite green pair of Converse: the nerves on their inside would become sore and inflamed, almost insulted. In my mid-twenties, my knees made it clear to me that I could never be a runner, and barely a recreational jogger. Simultaneously, my left knee suffered an injury from hitting the edge of a concrete step as I was carrying a wheel of cheese from the cellar to the shop floor of a London deli I was working at. I tripped, and because my hands were busy protecting the cheese, I hit the kneecap at full force. The cheese emerged dent-free from this experience. My knee, for its part, required multiple cycles of osteopathy, taping, and acupuncture to go back to quasi-normal.

Fast forward to the present, I have been trying to ignore the jolts of dull, uninterrupted pain these delicate and now-37-years-old knees have been sending to my brain anytime I’d walk downhill for a prolonged period of time. The pain stops the moment the incline changes and so I have been trying to minimise the situation. Until, on a recent hike on the Dolomites, I ached so badly on the 1300m decent down Mt Serva that I thought I’d never make it to the car. This was enough to convince me, the next morning, to do the grown-up thing of phoning my GP. The secretary on the other end of the line gave me an appointment for the end of February. Yesterday, I finally went.

“Congratulations,” the GP said to me in her heavy-accented, cheerful Venetian inflection after examining my leg joints.
”For…?”
”For your solo hikes! They sound great. I do little walks every now and then myself, but always with other people. Although, being a slow walker, it’s almost as if I was doing them alone.”
”Well, thank you. I love them, truly. I hope I can keep doing them,” I said picking up the referral letters and the prescription she had printed out for me.
”I’m sure,” she added with a smile, walking me to the door.

Out of her office, I stepped into a bright winter morning whose warmth held a promise of spring. I didn’t want to go home, and so I walked down the Fondamente Nove and along the waterfront. Every now and then, I paused to take in the view of the snowy peaks in the distance, encircling the horizon like a crown, looking incredibly near. I thought of the Alta Via I wanted to do up there, someday, and of all the steps I needed to take to get there, including getting my knees in prime shape. I turned to the right along the perimetrical walls of the hospital complex. As I entered the campo with the brick church and the stone-and-marble Renaissance facade of the Ospedale Civile—the most beautiful hospital in the world, by far; a magnificent foreword to the cluster of modern buildings hidden behind—I was reminded that I could go in to the CUP get my appointments sorted right then.

The CUP [Centro Unico Prenotazioni, aka Unified Reservation Centre] in Venice is a metaphor for so many things, I’ll probably forget most of them. It’s certainly a distilled version of the social canvas of the city itself—of what it’s made of, which is, overwhelmingly, older people. That’s just a fact. As much as one might argue that it’s more likely to see older people in hospitals on average, it’s also true that the diminutive amount of youth living in Venice—students, for the most part—are almost never residents. They live here, they study here, they pay rent and food and public transport here; they are active citizens, but they are not legal residents, so they can’t vote for the city mayor and they can’t access the local healthcare system unless it’s an emergency (i.e. they can go to the ER). And anyway, at this rate, few of them are staying and becoming residents after they finish University, so it’s easy to draw a series of conclusions on how many years we have left before not just this CUP, but the city as a whole, gets emptied out of its most basic services because they are technically no longer needed.

Meanwhile, those who were sitting around me belong to a generation, which is also the generation of my parents, that has been living through the beginning and end tail of the Great Welfare State. They are watching it being dismantled bit by bit—a demise that is in part, though not entirely, their own responsibility—while they still managed to get the best of it. And now, sitting here in the waiting room of the Reservation Centre, with their poor phone etiquette—loud ringtones, Facebook videos played on loudspeaker, private conversations held in public for everyone to hear—they have a selfishness, a carelessness about themselves that I find unnerving. It’s a trait I don’t see in my generation—the fucked-up Millennials, if we want to put a name on it—and I am at a loss as of why that is. I wonder if it has something to do with the fact that we had to learn to be thankful for the crumbs we found among the ashes of this burnt-down society we have inherited and, at the same time, apologetic for—and critical of—our inability to make roses bloom out of it. All I know is that, when in doubt, we keep our phones on silent mode and use that thing called earphones, and that’s enough to believe we haven’t come out all that bad. But all the same, many of us seem to be on the verge of imploding. We take our rage to the old lady yelling on the phone about the state of her cysts. We ask her, with a murderous politeness, if she could please take it outside. This, again, might have nothing and everything to do with the CUP, which is a metaphor of our society at large, but I sense it has at least something to do with my knees. I walk so I don’t implode, and my knees are the means to this end.

Now, all this venting requires nuance, or at least some context. These people—including myself—were sitting at the CUP because they—we—rely on the National Healthcare System. As lucky as we are to still have one, relying on it means waiting for months, depending on the area and region, to be seen by a doctor or get treatment or planned surgery. Those who can’t wait that long, either because they sense their case needs urgent care or because they want to get to the bottom of their ailment faster, or because they are in pain, will have to switch to private healthcare, if they can afford it. Many can’t. Those who can, are often breaking into their savings. Those who can see a private doctor without breaking into their savings are likely not found at the CUP. So, at every ringtone blasting in the room, I have to repeat to myself, like a mantra, that these people are not my enemies.

It dawned on me, walking out of the Ospedale after getting my x-rays booked and my physiatrics appointment put on a waiting list, that it was Fat Thursday, the last weekend of Carnival. There were bunches of colourful confetti on the ground; enigmatic figures in full-bodied costumes and masks parading around; and frittelle on pastry shops’ windows. It was a bright, blue-skied day and being at the CUP made me gloomy. All I could think of was how I wished international papers would cover stories such as the decline of a nation’s public healthcare system, or the dismantling of a city’s social fabric at the hand of awful administrators. Instead, they focused on smoke-and-mirrors stories like the Rialto Bridge being stuffed with day-trippers on the first Sunday of Carnival; or the city being overloaded with tourists during the high season, all the while omitting the fact that these were all a consequence, not the root cause, of the gradual cultural and social impoverishment of a community. When the sharpest economic strategy a country—and a city—can concoct is selling out its graces by the piece to the highest bidder, it shouldn’t come as a surprise when those who put down the cash actually come and claim their order.

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Coincidentally, I realised that yesterday was also the day in which, eighteen years ago, on a similarly bright midday that carried a taste of spring, I was released after a month in hospital following an emergency surgery that—I don’t say this lightly—brought me back from the near-dead. To save my life was a team of doctors working at the Padova University Hospital, which happens to be one of the best hospitals we have in this country operating under the National Healthcare System. To this day, I have been wondering whether I’d be writing this had I found myself anywhere else. I have no way of knowing, but part of me feels lucky. Just generally lucky.

What I guess I should also stress out, for those who read this from places where this is not an option—and just to add further perspective to this story, which is not a political story but can be, if we want to see it that way—is that my life was saved for free. The surgery and cures I received during the month I was hospitalised costed my family a grand total of zero euro, just like the person next to me received her liver transplant for a grand total of zero euro, and the lady in the other room received her chemo treatment for zero euro, too. I cannot begin to imagine how my life would have looked like if, at the age of nineteen, I had walked out of that hospital with my health restored and hundreds of thousands of euros in debt to my name. It is deeply inhumane to think of and no one can convince me of the contrary.

This is not a political story, though. It’s also not a near-death story. It’s a personal story that I told a few times to a few people. My parents and I resume it in glimpses around this time of the year as a way to remember and ease the trauma. But in the eighteen years that now distance me from that experience, the idea of putting it down on a page never occurred to me, which is bizarre, especially because, by nature, I tend to make sense of things through writing. In personal narrative, especially, I hardly ever know where I’m going as I type: I just know that through typing, and only this way, the story will eventually reveal itself to me. Not with this story. Memories are so sharp and detailed and logical, that I never felt the need to jot them down to fully see them. Yesterday, though, the feeling of stepping out of the Venice Ospedale—the blinding sunlight, the unexpected warmth, the brightness, the musings about healthcare—triggered the sensorial memory of stepping out of another hospital on this exact same calendar day, after a month that, unlike the one that’s about to end, seemed to never come to a close.

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**Trigger Warning: This story contains descriptions of surgery and medical procedures, which may be distressing for some readers. Proceed with care.**

On the night between January 30th and January 31st, 2007, I was collected from the shared students’ apartment where I was living at the time and rushed in an ambulance to the Emergency Room of the Padova University Hospital. My apartment was nestled in a pedestrian street not far from the Piazza delle Erbe, so narrow that the ambulance could barely drive through it. When the medical staff arrived at the apartment, they tried to help me out of bed and walk me down the stairs on foot, but seeing I couldn’t even stand, one of them picked me up and carried me in his arms and eased me into the vehicle. The journey to the hospital down the medieval pavement of Via San Francesco sent me in tears from the excruciating, diffused pain I felt at every bump; it only lasted but five minutes, but it felt infinite.

My mother was with me in the ambulance. That same afternoon, my roommate had called her saying that he had found me unconscious on the bathroom floor and that he was worried. I, on the other hand, said that she didn’t need to come; all I had was a bad gastric flu. I had fainted because I was weak and dehydrated and had a high fever and hadn’t eaten. But the truth was that I wasn’t able to keep any liquids down and pain killers had stopped working. My belly was swollen and taut and I couldn’t sleep because of the pain. A couple of hours after that first call, I fainted again and hit my head on the bathroom threshold. My roommate picked me up a second time, and then called my mother saying to please come. Around dinner time, she arrived. She monitored my temperature and asked me whether I wanted to go to the hospital. I said no; that it would pass. When she saw I couldn’t get out of bed and I was crying from the spasms, she finally said, “That’s it, I’m calling an ambulance.”

At the ER, I was placed on a stretcher and checked-in and given a green code [low risk] and rolled to the waiting ward. Memories are blurry; all I could think of was PAIN! PAIN!. A first blood test showed no signs of infection—no abnormal white-cell count. I was asked a series of questions and my answers proved inconclusive. Ruling out the infection route, my symptoms—swollen abdomen, pain, weakness, and all the other things—could have meant a million things, none of them urgent. I was given some pain killers and left on the stretcher until morning, waiting for further test results. In the early hours, my father arrived. I remember his eyes: he looked at me with the vacant expression of someone who had seen something surprising and frightening. “What’s wrong with her?” he asked. “They don’t know,” my mother said.

At 8am, the ER doctor came to me saying that they were probably going to release me and refer me to my GP. I said that I was suffering greatly and if they could please at least give me something for that. The doctor said that perhaps it was worth running a final test and see if it was a gynaecological issue. For that, I waited until 3pm. They gave me more pain killers and I tried to sleep, my mother standing there, exhausted, while my father left for work. In the end, those tests came back negative, too. Nothing out of the ordinary. They ran more blood tests. Nothing. The pain had become so sharp and numbing that I could no longer feel the central part of my body and my legs. Finally, at 6pm, a new ER doctor started her shift and found my case on her desk. She called me in, studied my paperwork in detail, and thought it looked like a surgical matter; she decided to send me to the General Surgery ward for a consultation. By then, I had spent 48 hours at home with symptoms and about 16 hours in the ER, on that stretcher, losing fragments of aliveness by the minute.

Up at the Surgery ward, on the third floor of the hospital building, I was seen by a young specialising surgeon with a kind face and a gentle bolognese accent. After visiting me, he left the room and came back saying that they were going to operate on me. “It’s going to be fine,” I remember him saying, calmly. “We’re just in a bit of a rush.” He asked me to sign a waiver and called in the technician with the electrodes for a quick heart check. “All good,” she said. “Great, let’s go,” the young surgeon replied, rolling me out of the room. My mother, rushing by his side, asked him how long it would take. He said about 45 minutes. I waved her goodbye as the door of the elevator closed behind me.

At the entrance of the operating theatre, I was asked to get undressed and put on the hospital gown I was handed. A nurse saw me struggling and asked if I needed any help. “I’m sorry, it’s hard to stand,” I told her. She helped me back on the stretcher and I was taken into the theatre and set under a bright light made of many round white dots. I remember the anaesthetist’s cap having bunnies on it. He said a few words to me but things—dots of light, doctors’ faces, bunnies on caps—had already started to go blurry before going pitch black.

The next thing I know, I was trembling and jerking on a bed while my mother tried to put a pair of pyjama pants on me. I had tubes and plastic bags hanging from various parts of my body, while more plastic bags full of liquids were hanging from a metal pole and tethered to my arms. I couldn’t sit up. I lifted my pyjama top and saw that my belly button had been covered with a bandage, and that a second bandage was running from the base of my right hip all the way down. My throat hurt terribly. I asked for some water and the nurse said: “I’m sorry, dear, but you won’t be able to drink for a couple of days. You have an NG tube. That’s maybe why your throat hurts.” I touched my face; a plaster was holding down a thin plastic thing that entered my nose. “Please,” I said. She dampened a gauze and placed it on my lips so I could suck the moisture out of it. “That’s the best we can do,” she said with an empathic smile.

I was later told that the operation went fine but the situation was severe. The doctor who performed surgery was a luminary in the field of liver transplants. He was coming down from another operation and, after being presented with my case, had decided to stay; there was no time to call another doctor and he was the only one in the ward who could perform the procedure. The operation lasted three hours, he said. The acute peritonitis provoked by a perforated, asymptomatic appendicitis had caused an extended infection that, in time, had inhibited white-cell production and spread to my entire abdominal cavity and, even after surgery and a thorough cleaning, remained present in the interstices between my organs and behind my lungs. My mother thanked him and asked him what was next. She later said that he told her, “For now, we’re lucky to have her.”

From then onwards, my case was handed to the Head of the Gastro-Intestinal Department and to a different specialising doctor for day-to-day care. Bed 17, on the right-hand side of a room of four at the end of the corridor became the centre of my world. Friends and family came to see me. Some of them brought me books and flowers and chocolate that my mother ate to stay awake at night, sitting on a foldable chair while I dozed off wrapped in my skein of tubes.

Three days after surgery, the specialising doctor I was assigned to came to me and said it was time to remove the NG tube. He told me to close my eyes and hold my breath on the count of three and, when he said “Three!”, I felt a grotesquely long and sci-fi-esque thing being pulled out of my body through a nostril. “Good,” he said, rolling the tube and placing it on a cart. “Now you can drink.” He asked a nurse to bring me some water, poured me a glass and handed it to me. I took a couple of sips. Nothing had ever tasted better than those drops of clear liquid sliding down my throat. “Poca,” he said. Easy. That was the first time I truly noticed him: tall and lean, with grey-green eyes and a head of short black hair with a white turf sticking out, like a plume. I liked his tone of voice, calm and composed. Later, I realised that I also liked when he tried—and comically failed—to switch to dialect whenever the older lady in Bed 15 addressed him this way. And I liked that he’d blush anytime that same old lady, perfectly coiffed and with a case of liver cyst, told him, unashamed, “Che beo che te sì, dottore," [Doctor, you’re so handsome]. He would try to look unfazed and carry on with his duties, and I would look at him and giggle, and he would smile back and give me a side eye. Once, the lady asked him how old he was and he said he was 27.

For about two weeks, I was nourished and hydrated through an IV while pain killers were released into my veins at a steady rate through an elastomer system. People talked to me and I would fall asleep mid-sentence. I felt high all the time, snoozy and blissfully pain-free. Sometimes, I would wake up from a nap to find a cohort of medical students circling my bed, staring at me with scrutinising looks while a professor said, “Excuse me, may I?” and proceeded to lift my pyjama top and point at my stomach to prove a point he was making.

These were the high moments. The funny moments. The moments I held onto. But my condition was actually complicated. What was meant to be a downhill path to recovery turned out to be a twisted road full of false starts and detours. After about two weeks of treatment—complete with one change of antibiotics due to an allergic reaction, plus a thrombosis scare—the infection was still widespread. Blood tests, ultrasounds, scans, x-rays, CATs and whatnot showed that I hadn’t improved all that much; the antibiotics weren’t working as expected. My fever remained high, my bodily functions were heavily compromised. I could barely eat a spoonful of broth without my entire system revolting against me.

And even so, up until then I’d felt entirely hopeful. I had a blind trust in what they were doing to me, and in the fact that they would cure me. It was only after seeing yet another “serious case” being released in a matter of three days that I got discouraged. How serious was mine, then? How many more days was I supposed to be stuck in Bed 17? I asked these questions to the universe and, coincidentally, to my mother, who was there helping me into a fresh pyjama set, pants loose at the waist, barely holding on my hipbones. “I’ll never get out of here,” I said, weeping. “Yes, you will,” she said, wearing a comforting parental look. I stood up to go to the bathroom, hunched over, pushing my pole of IV liquids. The reflection I saw in the mirror—the grey complexion, the bony face, the dirty hair—made me weep a little harder. I asked my mother if she could help me wash my hair. “Of course, let’s try,” she said. In the sink of the shared bathroom, I bent over as much as I could while she shampooed and conditioned and rinsed and air-dried and brushed. I pinned my clean hair back using a colourful clip and I felt better. “I brought you the Harry Potters,” she said. “If you feel like reading.”

At the end of the second week, my case had begun splitting opinions among doctors and surgeons. Something needed to happen; I was getting worse. Some thought I should undergo a second round of surgery to try and remove the pools of infection that, unresponsive to treatment, remained stubbornly stuck to my insides. Some others suggested consulting an infectiologist to see if he’d prescribe a different set of antibiotics. In the end, all agreed on this second strategy. I had no voice in the matter, I could just overhear pieces of conversation as the news was delivered to my mother down the corridor. The infectiologist came to see me later that day, accompanied by the young specialising doctor. He looked at my medical record and soon left; a nurse came in to take a blood sample. Shortly after, the same nurse returned with a fresh set of medicines and bottles of physiological solution. “New treatment!” she chirped. She searched for a vein that hand’t been atrophied by other treatments, and eventually stuck the needle into the side of my wrist. “Sorry,” she said. “Not much left, unfortunately. Let’s try and avoid going through the whole production of setting up a central, shall we?”

She also handed me a new contraption. It was a plastic box containing three balls—one red, one orange and one green. The box was attached to a tube; I had to blow into the tube and practice lifting the balls. The goal was to lift all three of them. It was a training device for my lungs, she said, to prevent them from getting shrunk and sick. “If you can lift them all it means that you have good pulmonary expansion,” she added. “Practice as much as you can.” After she left, I tried to blow into the tube a few times with all the energy I had. My stitches hurt like hell, and even so, I could only lift the red ball. The orange and green balls, meanwhile, remained solidly stuck to the bottom, heavy as stones.

The new antibiotics eventually started to work. They were delivered to my body diluted in so much liquid that I wondered whether they were actually radioactive in their undiluted form. Whatever the case, my omnipresent fever started to come down. Values stopped being alarming. My mother began spending the night at home and came to see me at visiting hours, taking turns with my father and aunts and uncles whenever they could. Everybody stopped looking at me like I was a ghost and I liked the effect their presence had on my spirit.

A few days into the new treatment, I was given a semi-solid meal plan: soup, tea, mashed potatoes, stracchino and applesauce. Food felt foreign, hurtful even. Attempting to swallow more than a bite or two was agony, like trying to defy my own body, forcing it to do something it clearly couldn’t and didn’t want to do. But this, too, came to pass. Every day, I succeeded in keeping down a little more food, then a little more, holding onto the tangible nature of these improvements—one spoonful, two spoonfuls—believing they must be a reflection of what was invisibly going on inside me. By the fourth week, I was moved to a solid diet. Every night, a nurse left a set of forms in our room where we could check our preferences for breakfast, lunch and dinner. Lunch and dinner always included an intriguing range of options for primo, main course, and dessert. Breakfast, however, was repetitive and depressing. I told the nurse I was tired of rusks and she said: “I know. Get someone to bring you some biscuits, please.” So I asked my mum if she would buy me a pack of Macine. She arrived with a family pack and I stored it inside my bedside table. The next morning, seeing I was munching on the buttery biscuits with my cup of tea, the nurse smiled and nodded and said, “Very good.”

“Aren’t you supposed to study for the exams you missed?” the specialising doctor with the grey-green eyes said one day, noticing that I was ignoring the textbooks of Italian literature my roommate had brought me and, instead, was flying through Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire. “I don’t feel like it,” I responded, holding his humoured gaze with a defiant smile. “I guess I can cut myself some slack in this situation, don’t you think?” “If you say so,” he said ironically. I had been living on Bed 17 for twenty-five days by then. The level of informality in our conversation had become close to a dialogue between two quasi-friends, or two colleagues exchanging notes. I enjoyed it very much. I enjoyed being his success story, seeing him look at me with observant, inquisitive eyes from across the room while his superior was talking to another patient. I liked seeing him chuffed at the view of someone who was half-dead just two weeks before and, now—Now! Look at her!—was eating bits of bread and chicken and green beans.

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Many times my mother has joked about the fact that flirting with that doctor was the one thing that actually kept me alive. She’s convinced it gave me an excuse to not let myself go, look reactive and presentable; a reason to get better so that I could be out of there and actually start a conversation outside of the patient-doctor dynamic. Sometimes I wonder if she’s actually right. I certainly got a tremendous crush on him, which is why, when he eventually came to my bedside to tell me that they were going to release me the next day, I felt taken aback. I knew it was coming: I was lifting the three balls inside the contraption; I was eating some food; I could walk without bending over in pain; my temperature was down to a mild fever. Part of me couldn’t wait to go back to my life, to the second semester of undergraduate classes that was about to begin, to my friends and my routine. I wanted those things with all my might. Part of me felt totally unprepared to leave that protected world of care that had become so familiar to me, and the daily visits the young specialising doctor paid me. In the end, all I could say was, “Oh God, really?” “I know, who would have thought?” he said, grinning with pride.

Among the pain and the endurance and the patience and the hope and the gratitude and the loneliness and the despair and the disassociation and the fear and all the trying and life-altering things that have modelled my character, I now realise that right there, on that hospital bed, wrapped in tubes, heavily medicated, I found through that simple connection a very human and beautiful lightness. A deep, powerful desire to live, and to feel, that remained with me for a long time.

On the last day, my mother came to pick me up at noon. She brought me a pair of jeans and a sweater to change into, the first real clothes after a month of colourful pyjamas. I put them on and, for a moment, I thought she had mistakenly picked up someone else's—my brother’s, perhaps, or hers. She looked at me indulgently as I stacked two hands and placed them between my belly and the waistband. I had lived in a bubble of soft fabrics and lack of self-consciousness, a place where bodies were fixed, not scrutinised or judged. I was busy making it through and had lost track of my shrinking. That my body was no longer what it was, and would never be; that I would never be who I was before: those were truths I only fully grasped then.

We walked out finally, and the sun felt blinding and warm on my pale face and the outside felt novel and strange and open. I promised to myself I would not waste this second chance I was handed—whatever flavour the not wasting it would have had at any given time. Sometimes, it tasted like reading alone in my room. Others like throwing myself in the middle of a dance floor, or biking breathlessly, or studying to graduate on time, or dreaming big, or taking risks and failing majorly, and mostly, it tasted like all of it, together, layered on my skin. I lived my early twenties in a rush and it felt like the only way I could live them—eagerly.

I never saw that doctor again. We corresponded briefly, in the hiccupy way in which people corresponded in 2007, using real mail first, and then email. I pursued him with intention, surfing the wave of aliveness I felt in my last days in the General Surgery ward, intercepting his grey-green gaze, flirting for no reason in particular, only because it felt like what a living person would do. Anyway, I eventually found the courage to ask him out. He responded he would have loved to see me, but that he was already in a relationship. “Ah, fuck,” I thought, and that was the end of it. To this day, I look at my nineteen-years-old self and think, how beautiful to get a crush in that selfless way. How beautiful to brush it off and see the rest of my life unfold, while forever holding a seed of gratitude for that person that contributed to get me where I was, in the position of asking him out and being told “Sorry, no,” and thinking “Oh, OK, whatever,” and go on living.

That spring, I studied relentlessly, made new friends, crushed on someone else. I went out on Wednesday nights, drank spritz against my better judgment, endured a medicine-induced gastritis, recuperated my exams, enrolled at a local gym and tried and failed to put on weight. My knees began to feel achey then, possibly from fat and muscle loss, and from putting them through a lot of strain as I walked in Converse and biked to class, to get-togethers, to aperitivi, to send letters to crushes with grey-green eyes. Instead of crippling debt, I got a future in a pair of dodgy knees. They are my inheritance, along with my scars and the shards of these memories that are now living in writing, no longer just in my head.