Mafalda Cancela de Abreu is a Portuguese woman who just a year ago was on the verge of losing her life after contracting a seemingly harmless flubut which led her to be in an induced coma for nine days, hospitalized for three months and she even suffered several amputations of her extremities.
As explained in an interview on the program Two to 10 from the Portuguese channel TVI, “I started having a flulike everyone else, with normal symptoms. “I remember my goal was to be well for Christmas.”
However, as the days passed, “it was getting worse and worse“, he assured. “I no longer got out of bed, I no longer ate, I no longer did anything… Not only did I have pneumonia,” he said. It was then when he realized that what was happening to him It was much more serious than a simple flu, for which she was hospitalized.
The diagnosis was critical: “I had toxic shock (…). The kidney part, all the organs, liver, lungs, heart…”, he described. This was the reason why the doctors decided put her in an induced comaand it was like that for nine days.
Regarding that coma experience, he explains that he did not have “the perception that I could die, because I had no idea what had happened to me. I had no idea where I was. What happens during a coma, there are people who They don’t remember anything, but I I remember being like inside a nightmare and couldn’t get out. There are many delusions that we mix with reality, with things we really hear. It’s very distressing,” he revealed.
Luckily, Mafalda was able to come out of the coma, although with after-effects. The high doses of some medications he was given caused doctors to have to amputate a legas well as some fingers of the hand and the other foot.
Today, women wait for a prosthesis with which she can walk again, since she recognizes that, in everything else, she is completely autonomous. “I have to fully recover, I still have a long way to go, I still have to walk,” he confessed.
After having gone through this near-death experience, Mafalda sees life with another perspective and recognizes that is happier now.
“It’s hard to explain it to a person who has never gone through something like this, but it’s because of that feeling of gratitude. I met so many people this year, spectacular, I felt like they were all by my side… It’s impossible not to feel happy with that. I feel happy and I feel that I have more capacity to do everything,” he says. “I usually say that what happened to me was not a coincidence,” he concludes.