It is not that the Spanish tourist from 67 years had just completed a world sporting feat in India. It’s not like that woman from Madrid had discovered a miraculous drug. Not that she had found a formula to end the hunger that plagues the country few days following landing there.
And Teresa Fernandez San Francisco made the headlines of the Asian giant’s press a month ago, it is because she fulfilled her will following her death in a place where hardly anyone does what she does: in the country of organ trafficking, the family of the Spanish health company selflessly donated theirs .
So the press of the nation of 1,400 million inhabitants and 200 million hungry people took to its pages what fortunately is no longer news in Spain.
We read in a medium: “Spanish woman gives gift of life to 5 people”. (“Spanish woman gives gift of life to five people”).
We read in another: “Daughter suggested organ donation”. (“Daughter suggested organ donation”).
Thanks to The Indian ExpressFor example, we know details that here would be prohibited by law. Let’s say that the main organs of our healthcare were for four Indians, one of them a 54-year-old doctor who received a liver transplant. Let’s say that the fifth recipient was a Lebanese, who received Teresa’s traveled heart.
Thanks to statistics we know how relevant this story is. If in 2022 there were 2,196 dead donors in Spain (a rate of 46.3 per million inhabitants), in 2021 there were no more than 552 in India (0.4 cases per million citizens).
and thanks to his daughter the father, we know that sometimes the best of the Spain brand is not necessarily a successful businessman. Not an unbeatable athlete. Not a famous actor. But an anonymous, ordinary person, who had asked his family to leave in an extraordinary way.
“She was a career pharmacist, she worked as a specialist in clinical analysis at the Torrecárdenas University Hospital, in Almería, where she was a resident tutor. Her vocation as a health care provider began early. When she was young, she was going to study Medicine at the Complutense, but when she found out that this degree did not start until January, she started with Pharmacy, which started in September. That’s how my mother was: she didn’t like to waste time”.
Behind the biographical sketch of a mother, there is above all the sketch of a health professional with an early vocation. One that not only influenced her daughter, but has also influenced generations and generations of professionals.
“I remember my mother studying since I was very young, she had all the bathroom mirrors defaced with markers that she was erasing as she studied the syllabi. Thanks to her, my brother [auxiliar de autopsias] me too [médico de urgencias en el Hospital de Calahorra, en La Rioja] we are what we are. We have lived in the hospital since we were children, many times he would take us there when he worked”.
“She had a lot of character. She was a great defender of public health. Very feisty, even if she had to face the entire hospital. As a tutor for residents, she would break her face for them. He said that they were there to learn, not to suck the guards of the adjuncts. that was our mother“.
It happened on his fourth trip to India. But it might have happened before. Because Teresa was never still.
In June 2022 he had been in Iceland. Last September she had spent her holidays in the Balearic Islands. In November she had visited South Korea…
Teresa’s endless map full of thumbtacks included Guatemala, Thailand, Costa Rica, Morocco, Portugal, Turkey, the United States… Because for this separated woman with two children, the best way to spend money was to travel. She almost always alone. Almost always with a backpack. Almost always for hiking or diving.
So that time when the possibility of a fourth 22-day trip to India (this time in a group), he did not think too much regarding it and returned to the country. He left on January 4. On the 5th I was already in Mumbai. That day they were going to do two excursions. The first was to Puerta de la India: that one he did. The second was to Elephant Island: that will not do it.
“Before leaving, on January 3, my mother called me from Almería, where she had lived for more than 20 years, but we mightn’t talk because the coverage was very bad. Then she tried once more, but my mobile was silent So we mightn’t communicate. The next thing I knew, I was in a coma in that country.“, says Aitana, her daughter.
“Apparently, she got lost at Puerta de la India because there were a lot of people and she got lost in the group, and that caused her a lot of tension. Five minutes following getting on the bus, with everyone else, she mightn’t move her right arm So they stopped at the Jaslok Hospital, a private center. They wrote to me on Facebook messenger and explained the situation to me. The guide called me. There were three doctors on the excursion and the three of them stayed with my mother there. They called me by video call and sent me the scan images of her. He had had a hemorrhagic stroke due to a hypertensive crisis and was in critical condition“.
Until January 7, Aitana and her brother Arturo did not manage to reach their mother: “As soon as I saw her in bed in the ICU – she recalls – I already knew that she was not going to wake up. We played songs by Louis Armstrong, classical music , he what you give me of Pau Donés, voices of friends sending her strength… But nothing”.
Then, to the pain of the moment, tension is added: despite the fact that she is brain dead, the doctors at the hospital tell her that they cannot disconnect her because it would be equivalent to a euthanasia.
“But my mother always said that she wanted to donate. So saying everything was easier. The truth is that they were very surprised when I told them, as if that were strange, I told them that in Spain donating was very normal. That was when We had doubts because there is not like here. ‘But the receiving person won’t pay for them, will they?’ ‘There will be a list of patients where the most urgent cases will be attended to, right?’ ‘The organs won’t go to the one with the most money, right?’. At midnight from January 11 to January 12, they took my mother to the operating room and the next morning to the cremation chamber.”
That same day, five families that perhaps do not know where Spain falls and that ignore everything regarding Teresa -the color of her eyes, her love of yoga, her passion for skating- receive a bigger prize than that of Slumdog Millionaire.
There are four Indians. One of them, a 54-year-old doctor.
And a Lebanese.
(…)
Beatriz Dominguez-Gil is a nephrologist and director of the National Transplant Organization of Spain. Which is to say that he is the person in charge of the best transplant organization on the planet.
“We are talking regarding a country, India, where organ trafficking schemes have been dismantled. Where there are people trafficked from Nepal to take them coerced or deceived to India, to specific centers to transplant rich people,” he says. “All of this generates mistrust in the system.”
“That’s why we should be proud of our model,” he adds. “We must not forget that it stands on three legs: our public health system of a universal character; a model of management excellent; and our society, exemplified in a person like Teresa…”.
His children did not arrive in Spain until January 13. The urn with the mother’s mortal ashes that they were given was mixed with skeletal remains, which is why they had to invoice it. Like luggage. Inside the suitcase. Almost like a nod to mom: Teresa, traveler to the end.
When the hospital director called Aitana to ask her permission to tell her story in the media, the daughter granted it, but she might not avoid a question.
-And in India why don’t people donate their organs?
-Here you can’t even consider it -he answered-… They are very superstitious. When they die, they leave with everything.
At home, following digesting the loss, also taking stock of the 15.000 euros spent between plane tickets and the mother’s hospital bill (gauzes included), Aitana wrote on her social networks thanking her.
“Thank you to all the people who have written and called us and those who have not but have kept us in their thoughts and prayers. It is always hard to lose a mother, but even more so having to do it thousands of miles from home, in a country you don’t know, with different laws to fight once morest and you don’t understand. We’ve had a very bad time, but thanks to you and your help it has become more bearable. We don’t know the healthcare we have in Spain until something happens to you abroad Universal and free healthcare, which we do not value”.
Aitana says that she will also donate.
“She was generous to the end… you know what?” she asks us over the phone. “The only thing my mother told us not to donate was her beautiful blue eyes. She commented that she wouldn’t want to see the world through someone else.”