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Angela Maria de Faria

  • Foto do escritor: Bruno Morato
    Bruno Morato
  • 26 de jul. de 2023
  • 5 min de leitura

Atualizado: 31 de ago. de 2023

My aunt had been dying for over 15 years when my cousin called me to deliver the news, on a warm January morning. Just two days before, I had written her a prescription for morphine in a vain attempt to alleviate the pain that corroded her bones as she left her body and her metastatic breast cancer into what she believed to be “the void” and I believe to be “afterlife”. Her relieving passing came on her sleep, her final envied achievement.

Angela Maria de Faria was among the youngest of 18 siblings. Before her, came my father Mauro Angelo de Faria, her sister Maria Angela de Faria, her brother Mario Angelo de Faria, and a few other slight variations of the firstling’s name. When you have that many children, name choices are less of a special process and more of an item to check off the “new baby” list. My grandmother waited until she gave birth to two or three children at her small rural house before she traveled to register the whole batch in the nearby town.

A year before aunt Angela’s death, her two sons and I, all medical students, took her on a “last trip” to Paris and Portugal. We saw it was her last. We saw it on the few faded hairs that bravely managed to resist chemotherapy and malnourishment. We saw it on her relieved face upon finding an electric scooter to ride through Paris instead of marching on her feeble muscles and bones abraded by metastasis. Most importantly, we saw it on the unusual bitterness that pain managed to bring to surface despite her best efforts to keep it submerged. Her tragedy was gently introduced in our lives over a decade, and we knew what to expect, when to expect it and how to handle it.

When the hospital gathered the 12 surgery students, 8 residents, and 6 attendings in a small room to tell us that all elective surgeries were cancelled until further notice, we did not know what to expect. I was rotating at a medium-sized public teaching hospital in São Paulo, getting ready to graduate in two weeks and finally practice medicine in real life. My emancipation a few days away made the early inconveniences of what was soon to become a pandemic lukewarm. I wish I could perform my last operations, but thanked God it happened late enough to prevent any harm to my medical education. I still had all gun shots, car accidents, perforated ulcers, and appendicitis to keep me at least half busy. Little did I know that this minor inconvenience would abruptly explode to govern my next two years, and provide some of the most defining medical experiences of my life.

A few days after that department meeting, I watched as a 14-year-old daughter hurriedly said goodbye to her dying mother through a glass door several feet away from her ICU bed. Blessed are those who have the chance to demonstrate the full extent of their affection to their passing loved ones, without a galloping deadline, a full, beeping hospital ward, or medical isolations. I was providentially bestowed with this blessing a few years ago. Upon my father’s 70th birthday, my best friend inspired me to send him a surprise video from 500 miles away. I collected love declarations from his seven children, five siblings and a few nephews and nieces, and sent it to him at 10:43pm, after a long day of medical rotations. “This makes me want to live longer”, he replied after I went to bed, in an almost prophetical last text. He died 3 hours later.

My aunt taught me more about care than 6 years of medical school. Medicine introduced me to achalasia, Klinefelter, hemophilia, neuroma, lipodystrophy. It showed me the differences between nodules, papules, macules, and pustules. It trained me to identify a ventricular fibrillation and manage a cardiac arrest without even accessing my cortex, all done at the spinal cord level. The remarkable antiemetic effect of lime ice cream, however, only aunt Angela was capable of demonstrating. Smuggling ice cream into the ICU, we found out, was as caring to her as it was to her sons, who found yet another way to demonstrate their affection, silently.

As the pandemic found its way through Brazil, my hospital followed general consensus and prohibited family visits to patients, in an effort to reduce the flow of people and, therefore, minimize the chances of an institutional breakout. What a futile effort. Viruses, it turns out, refused to follow hospital policies and kept coming and going as they pleased, hitchhiking on the blue scrubs of healthcare professionals who still needed to go home. How many sons were prevented from kissing their mothers goodbye or will carry the burden of half-said apologies for as long as they live? How many daughters will never be able to deliberately feel the warmth of their fathers’ skin? My white coat spared me from these feelings the two times aunt Angela was admitted during the pandemic.

We tried to save my father from his fatal heart attack for 50 days. He was in a military-run ICU in Brasilia, the capital of the country. Only one visitor was allowed at a time, to a maximum of two visitors per day. My father had 7 children, 6 grandchildren, and 5 siblings, only one white coat. I pleaded with the bedside nurse, the head nurse, the attending on call, and, finally, the head of medicine to get us an exception. 18 visitors a day were my father’s lime ice cream. Good for him, we hoped, essential for us.

He went through 8 surgeries, 3 of which were open chest. I was there for the second one, watching as surgeons massaged life back into his heart for 40 minutes. Around minute 37, the youngest surgeon turned to me and said “I am not sure we will get him back”. He hoped I would tell him to let him go. I should’ve but couldn’t. Not when my 6 siblings were outside. Not when this tragedy hit us so abruptly that we did not have the chance to discuss what to do. He stubbornly came back for a few more weeks of lime ice cream.

After my aunt died, we found a few of her writings — she had always dreamt of writing a book. In one of them, she recollects the joy of hearing me laugh on her ear as I rode on the back of her electric scooter on our last trip. She was partially deaf and took no sound for granted. In another, she wrote about our freezing dip in the winter French sea. “The most marvelous sensation. At first, breathtaking shock, followed by peaceful numbness, ended by alarming pain”. I wonder how she would’ve described her passing.


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